Lightroom

[jillw]

I remember someone telling me that Lightroom uses a lot of my computer's memory by saving copies of every edit of every photo (or something like that) and that there is a way of deleting these.
How do I do this?

Jill

[DavidM]

Hi Jill,
Did this myself couple of weeks ago. Was amazed that the backups of all the old Lightroom Catalog files was taking up 100Gb of space.
You can find out where the backups are stored on your computer by looking in Lightroom/Edit/Catalog Settings/General tab which will show you the location where the folder is stored.
Navigate to the back-up folder on your computer and you will see all the previous copies of the Catalog file - the file names are the date/time the back-up was done, so should be in date order.
I retained the most recent 5 files but deleted all the old copies - I guess just be careful not to delete them all

Hope that helps
David

[SimonP]

Hi Jill,

I agree with what David has said regarding the back-ups and would add my understanding is Lightroom stores a 'sidecar' file with all the instructions for the edits, rather than copies of images after each edit. The back-ups of the catalogue do mount up but by far the the biggest files in my experience are the preview files shown in this screenshot:

Screenshot 2022-11-26 at 21.28.50.png

This can be managed by the type of preview you have enabled but clearly they are big files. (Note this is a fairly new catalogue - they get much bigger over time.)
You can delete these at any time to gain space and it will rebuild previews as and when required. If, like me, you tend to import a lot of images into LR then whittle them down to those worth doing a bit of work on it makes sense to delete the preview files afterwards so you only retain/generate the relevant ones.

Hope this is helpful
Simon

[jillw]

Thanks David and Simon. I've managed to free up some much-needed space on my computer.
Jill