Delete develop history to reduce catalog size

[KarlGohl]

My search didn't find a previous mention of this, so I'm posting it in case it helps others.

My LR catalog has ~50K images and was about 7GB.  From some web research, I learned:
- The develop history entries can take a lot of space
- The Delete History operation just deletes the steps taken to get to the current state of the image.  That is, it doesn't revert the slider settings, adjustment brushes, etc. back to the default state.
- You can select a bunch of images (e.g. in Library), go to Develop, do Develop>Clear History.  It will give you the option of clearing the history off all selected photos.

I deleted the Develop History of all my photos from previous years (about 47K).  After optimizing the catalog, it's size was down to 2.2GB.

[john beardsworth]

The space saving is 4-5 gb in your case, which amounts to a few hundred raw files. Is that worth it?

I suppose the extra 4-5gb can add up to much more as you accumulate backup catalogues. But you can zip them, saving 90% of that space.

Remember too that History contains more than just the step-by-step adjustments - it has steps for each time you print or export a picture. Zap the History and it all goes, so you can't get back to how a picture looked when printed it on a certain date.

So while I don't think it's right or wrong to zap the History, I just prefer not to do so.

John

[Simon Garrett]

I'm surprised at the size of your catalogue.  Mine is 1.7G for 70,000 images, some of them very heavily edited.

Do you back up each week, letting it optimise and check the integrity?

[Hans Kruse]

My search didn't find a previous mention of this, so I'm posting it in case it helps others.

My LR catalog has ~50K images and was about 7GB.  From some web research, I learned:
- The develop history entries can take a lot of space
- The Delete History operation just deletes the steps taken to get to the current state of the image.  That is, it doesn't revert the slider settings, adjustment brushes, etc. back to the default state.
- You can select a bunch of images (e.g. in Library), go to Develop, do Develop>Clear History.  It will give you the option of clearing the history off all selected photos.

I deleted the Develop History of all my photos from previous years (about 47K).  After optimizing the catalog, it's size was down to 2.2GB.

I don't believe the develop history takes up any space at all. If your catalog is 7GB you are adding both the catalog itself (which is the .lrcat file) and the previews. You can delete the previews at any time and just regenerate them when needed.

I have about 82000 pictures in my catalog and it is 3,99GB in size.

[john beardsworth]

It definitely can take up a lot of disc space, Hans. See this recent post by Jeffrey Friedl who found that removing History halved the size of his lrcat file. The real question is whether it matters - it doesn't affect LR's performance, just backup - and that's only a personal preference.

[Simon Garrett]

Well, I was sure this must be wrong (about lots of space being taken up by edit history), so I've just done some tests on a copy of my catalogue to prove it's wrong.  I deleted the edit history for the last 6 months photos, and - err - the catalogue got significantly smaller!

However, I have 667 Gbyte of photos and currently 12 Gbyte of Lightroom previews, and I'm not going to fret about 1.7 Gbyte of catalogue.  Over a 1 Gbit Ethernet it takes only 20 seconds to backup.

I'm still a bit surprised at a 7 Gbyte catalogue for 50k images.  Karl must do an awful lot more editing than I do. 

[Hans Kruse]

It definitely can take up a lot of disc space, Hans. See this recent post by Jeffrey Friedl who found that removing History halved the size of his lrcat file. The real question is whether it matters - it doesn't affect LR's performance, just backup - and that's only a personal preference.

Thanks and I stand corrected Just a surprise, so I assume that the history is not just simple text.

[allegretto]

well, if it can be reversed every pixel change has to be recorded. That seems like something that certainly add up after time. Especially for those who want a "perfect" image

[wtlloyd]

When my boot drive ssd gets a little low on free space, I delete my old 1:1 previews, that usually gains 10-20 gigabites...I'd buy a larger drive before I would throw away my develop history. You can get a smokin' fast 1T ssd for about $450 USA.
I keep all of my current year raws on my ssd boot drive, everything else goes on internal/external hard drives.

[eliedinur]

When my boot drive ssd gets a little low on free space, I delete my old 1:1 previews, that usually gains 10-20 gigabites...I'd buy a larger drive before I would throw away my develop history. You can get a smokin' fast 1T ssd for about $450 USA.
I keep all of my current year raws on my ssd boot drive, everything else goes on internal/external hard drives.

Maybe there is something that I don't understand, but I have never seen the point of having lots of 1:1 previews and/or making them automatically during import. They are only used by the Library module and I zoom to 1:1 a lot in Develop but rarely in Library. Moreover, if I do zoom in Library loupe view, LR will at that time make the 1:1 preview. It means a four second wait, but because I rarely do it, that's not so terrible. And I have Preferences set to delete the preview after a week because the chances that I will need it again are small.

[wtlloyd]

Most of my photography is wildlife, specifically birds. I generate standard previews on import. Often, culling shots, I will need to look at 100% view to determine sharpness on multiple shots, flipping back and forth to compare files. Lightroom has to generate a 1:1 preview to display that. I will cull as much as I can before getting down to 1:1 viewing.
I typically come back with 200-400 shots, and try to end up with no more than 10% keepers.
1:1 previews are useful when traveling if you don't want to take a full raw files backup with you...this was particularly so before smart previews came into existence.

[CatOne]

well, if it can be reversed every pixel change has to be recorded. That seems like something that certainly add up after time. Especially for those who want a "perfect" image

I don't believe this is the case. That would be the case for a "pixel" editor but Lightroom is a parametric editor. Every change has to be recorded, but it is a descriptive "recipe" for the change, not the differences in values of every pixel. I would expect that the majority of changes could be represented by a few bytes, in fact. Though where the adjustment brush is used, they could get significantly larger because then you would need to somehow map the changes to the actual affected pixels.

Curiously, Aperture handled local adjustments by making TIFF masks of the affected pixels, and then recorded local adjustments but only displayed them in the masked area. I think LR does this very differently.