Bloated Light room Folder

[jwhee0615]

My Light room folder containing the preview and catalog files has now grown to nearly 23GB! I have gone from LR1 to LR3 over the years and the folder contains many files related to all versions. Are there some file I can dump now as this is taking a great deal of time when backing up my documents folder? Is there a way to purge old preview folders? Thanks for any info.

Jeff

[Jeremy Roussak]

My Light room folder containing the preview and catalog files has now grown to nearly 23GB! I have gone from LR1 to LR3 over the years and the folder contains many files related to all versions. Are there some file I can dump now as this is taking a great deal of time when backing up my documents folder? Is there a way to purge old preview folders? Thanks for any info.

Jeff

I think you can delete the preview folder, if you like. LR will rebuild previews as required: it may take some time, though, depending on your machine.

Deleting the catalog files is probably a bad idea, though.

Jeremy

[Alan Goldhammer]

My Light room folder containing the preview and catalog files has now grown to nearly 23GB! I have gone from LR1 to LR3 over the years and the folder contains many files related to all versions. Are there some file I can dump now as this is taking a great deal of time when backing up my documents folder? Is there a way to purge old preview folders? Thanks for any info.

Jeff

You might want to check and see how much space your back ups are taking.  I believe LR makes a fresh back up every time and does not delete any of the older ones.  If you are backing up daily this amounts to a lot of dead space.  I was surprised when I migrated my LR files to a new computer.  Worth a try.

Alan

[David Hufford]

You might want to check and see how much space your back ups are taking.  I believe LR makes a fresh back up every time and does not delete any of the older ones.  If you are backing up daily this amounts to a lot of dead space.  I was surprised when I migrated my LR files to a new computer.  Worth a try.

Alan

Yes, it does create fresh backups each time and leaves the old. If for some reason you want to keep all of the old backups, you can compress them and save tons of space. Or, simply delete the older ones. I have with no problems.

[wolfnowl]

This might be of interest to you...

http://www.wolfnowl.com/2010/05/deleting-o...htroom-backups/

Mike.

[Jeremy Roussak]

You might want to check and see how much space your back ups are taking.  I believe LR makes a fresh back up every time and does not delete any of the older ones.  If you are backing up daily this amounts to a lot of dead space.  I was surprised when I migrated my LR files to a new computer.  Worth a try.

Alan

If you're using a Mac, it's trivial to write a folder action script that will keep say 10 backups, deleting the old ones as new ones are made.

Jeremy

[JRSmit]

My Light room folder containing the preview and catalog files has now grown to nearly 23GB! I have gone from LR1 to LR3 over the years and the folder contains many files related to all versions. Are there some file I can dump now as this is taking a great deal of time when backing up my documents folder? Is there a way to purge old preview folders? Thanks for any info.

Jeff

What is the problem? How many images do you have in your catalogue? Previews take up some space. My previews folder size has grown even bigger.
It does not harm the performance, they can be deleted and will be recreated by LR when you view images in library mode, or when you explicitly ask LR to do so.
However there is no need to do so, if there are no issues.
The catalog itself is a database, stored as a file with the extension "lrcat". That file is not big in size, and is the one file you should not delete.

[jwhee0615]

What is the problem? How many images do you have in your catalogue? Previews take up some space. My previews folder size has grown even bigger.
It does not harm the performance, they can be deleted and will be recreated by LR when you view images in library mode, or when you explicitly ask LR to do so.
However there is no need to do so, if there are no issues.
The catalog itself is a database, stored as a file with the extension "lrcat". That file is not big in size, and is the one file you should not delete.

The problem is that I believe there are duplicate preview folders for the different versions of Light room that I have had installed. I use Karen's Replicator to backup my Documents folder which contains these files and it takes forever to go through them for some reason. I would like to know if I can delete the old preview folders as there is no need to hold on to previews of photographs that I don't access frequently.

[john beardsworth]

Well, people have answered that last question - just delete the previews folder, not the lrcat file. But if backup is the underlying issue, can't you set your backup to target the lrcat file and exclude the previews?

John