Light Room file clean up.

[Allan Bell]

I have just been cleaning up the LR files on my iMac and thought I would pass on some information, just in case LR users were unaware of the following.

 

But first please make sure you have made full backups of all files and folders just in case your clean up deletes something you still need.

 

LR makes a backup from time to time in catalogues but does not automatically delete the older catalogues. In time these build up and start to fill up your drives with old information that is no longer necessary to hold on disc thus reducing space available for work in progress and programs, if they are held on the same disc. By disc I mean SSD's too.

 

So if you go to Finder on a Mac, or Windows Explorer on a Windows machine and search for files named Lightroom Catalog.lrcat.zip and delete the older files, just keeping those up to a year old, again just in case you need to call up that info sometime.

 

You may find if you have been using LR incarnations for an extended period with carrying out the above work that you suddenly have a lot more space on your disc's.

 

Happy New Year.

 

Allan

[Matt Limb]

Allan

 

A worthy reminder as it is something that can soon fill your storage.  You can use a cheap and simple routine to keep them removed

 

Have a look at http://www.lightroom-plugins.com/RemBackup.php

[spacecadet]

There's a cheaper and simpler routine- turn off backups.

[MDM]

Lightroom only backs up the catalog which is not usually very large and it backs it up in a folder called Backups in the same folder as the catalog so should be easy to find and manually delete. It doesn't backup the preview files which can take up significant amounts of disk space and time to regenerate for a large catalog.

 

Depending on how you use Lightroom, it is probably sensible to make at least a weekly backup as the catalog can become corrupted, given that it is a database file. But I don't see the point in keeping older backups after you have added new images to the catalog. If you don't have the "Automatically write changes (to Metadata) into XMP" ticked in the Catalog settings, then it is sensible to make very frequent backups as the metadata will be stored in the catalog.

 

I write all the raw metadata off to the sidecar xmp files as set in the prefs and embed keywords in other file types. I don't rely on Lightroom specific features such as labels or virtual copies, so a catalog corruption would simple mean creating a new catalog and regenerating the previews. 

[SFL]

Lightroom only backs up the catalog which is not usually very large and it backs it up in a folder called Backups in the same folder as the catalog so should be easy to find and manually delete. It doesn't backup the preview files which can take up significant amounts of disk space and time to regenerate for a large catalog.

 

Depending on how you use Lightroom, it is probably sensible to make at least a weekly backup as the catalog can become corrupted, given that it is a database file. But I don't see the point in keeping older backups after you have added new images to the catalog. If you don't have the "Automatically write changes (to Metadata) into XMP" ticked in the Catalog settings, then it is sensible to make very frequent backups as the metadata will be stored in the catalog.

 

I write all the raw metadata off to the sidecar xmp files as set in the prefs and embed keywords in other file types. I don't rely on Lightroom specific features such as labels or virtual copies, so a catalog corruption would simple mean creating a new catalog and regenerating the previews. 

Me too.  Except all my raw files are DNGs, therefore, I don't have sidecar xmps.

 

Every now and then, I just delete old catalgogues and leave a month's worth of backup catalogues just in case.