Lightroom CC storing to my hard drive

[mberridge]

Admitingly I have not organized my photos in Lightroom well at all over the past year and a half since I begain using Lightroom CC. I work off a Macbbook Pro that has 256GB of local storage space. Currently Lightroom CC is taking up 170GB of space locally on my hard drive. This is obviously way too much for 1 application and creating a sluggish work flow. 

My question is why is Lightroom CC storing to my computers hard drive? How do I purdge these photos from my hard drive without loosing the raw files in my Lightroom? Also, what can I do to keep this from happening in the future? Is this a issue of poor organization in my Lightroom App or a incorrect defult setting that has them being stored in my Lightroom in a way that is creating duplicates?

Thank you for any and all advise.

[selondon]

In the Preferences, you can lower the percentage value of the photo cache plus make sure you are not storing Originals or Smart Previews locally.

Also, ensure that you are not storing any Albums locally.

Then restart the application