Lightroom doubles my images

[freddieb49416750]

Hi! 

Whenever I import photos from my camera to my computer and then import in to lightroom it creates a full size duplicate in the lightroom.lrlibrary file, how do I prevent this? Can't lightroom read from where the images are located on the SSD instead of creating a duplicate? My lightroom file is 175 GB at the moment so all these duplicate raw files are starting to take up most of my computer space for no apparent reason.

Thanks in advance!

[Jim Wilde]

By design, Lightroom first copies the images that are being imported into its own managed space, whether they are imported from camera/card or existing hard drive. It's those copies that are uploaded to the cloud. Once uploaded to the cloud the copies become eligible for deletion, but that doesn't happen immediately. There are some complex rules which determine when an individual file can be deleted by the app, but they are not very aggressive so the files tend to stay in the designated folder for longer than many users would like. Abobe are looking at this process, so hopefully some improvement will be made.

There are a couple of things you can do in the meantime:

1. You can assign a different location for these local copies (see the Preferences>Local Storage tab), which can be on an external hard drive. If you do that, Lightroom will automatically move any existing local copies from the lrlibrary to the new location.

2. You can manually delete the copies of the files from the Lightroom.library package, but only after they have been uploaded to the cloud.

3. You could also delete the originals that you used to import into Lightroom. Lightroom retains no awareness of the original location once they have been imported into its own space, so unless to are keeping them for other purposes they can safely be removed after the import and sync.