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I am desperate, never was good at these things (handling data files) and perhaps doing something wrong...
My Mac has only 500GB and Lightroom data files take 74 GB
Can something be done to reduce teh size ?
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You can place this on another drive, you can change your pref's for previews (for example, Automatically delete 1:1 previews after....), let's see your Catalog Settings>File Handling dialog.
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Thank You !!!
I am trying that today. I will now move the Lightroom data from Pictures to an external drive, delete it on my Mac and see if Lightroom works 🙂
Actually I realised, when prompted today by Lightroom to create a catalogue, and I chose a different path to the previous version. So I ended up with catalogues in 3 places.
I have already deleted the entire iCloud Archive (googled it that it is OK to do) and it had no negative impact on Lightroom.
   
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If I understand from your post header that you have multiple catalognamePreviews.LRDATA files, then-
If you only use ONE catalog then there is only a need for its ONE associated ...Previews.LRDATA file. Any others can be deleted.
Deleting the ...Preview.LRDATA files is not really a problem, as LrC will re-build these if and when needed.
What is a Lightroom catalog? | The Lightroom Queen
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Besides the tips to reduce disk space: major versions of LrC tend to create new catalog files. The old ones can be deleted after you decided that the version is stable. It's however always wise to make a backup before deleting.
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Where are your photos stored? These take up much more space than the previews. If the photos are stored on the internal drive, you need to move them to an external drive (see "Part 2 — Updating Photo Location" of this document for instructions)
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I keep the pictures on an external drive, due to space limitations on my Macs
SSD is so expensive when you go above 500 GB on Mac 😞
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No need for photos to be on a SSD.