Lightroom catalog 1.9GB, previews catalog 84GB!!!

[pablo9]

hello everyone,

this is my first post on this forum. I've heard a lot of good comments about this community so I'm very happy to join.

As I started implementing Lightroom into our wedding/portrait photography workflow, I noticed that the size of our main catalog started getting bigger and bigger very fast. Right now the size of the main catalog is 1.9GB and the previews file is 83.9GB!!! The number of all images in catalog about 1'6K.

I haven't noticed a significant change in the speed of lightroom. My computer rig is pretty fast (8-core Mac Pro with 1'GB RAM), but I can see a little slowdown.

I discarded all 1:1 previews. That decreased the size of the previews file to 8'.6GB (only 3.3GB difference!!!)

I run catalog optimization quite often, but my main HDD is already 6'% full (it's a 32'GB HD).

Is there anything I can do to reduce the size of the previews catalog? Can I simply delete it and rebuild only the previews I really need?

 

[Brad Snyder]

Pablo, if no one has said so, welcome to the forums.

When discarding previews, Lr is a bit lazy to actually erase the files. The actual algorithm is not publicly known, but it's said that this slowpoke method is to allow for undo's and the like. If you wait a day or two, the cache size should continue to decrease.

Yes, you can delete the whole preview cache package, and Lr will rebuild it at need. The tradeoff there is disk space gained versus the lost performance of not having the previews in the cache. The 1:1's are really only needed if you spend a lot of time zoomed in in Library views. Otherwise they're just wasted. If you don't zoom in a lot in Library, you may want to use standard previews. The previews aren't used at all in Develop module, views there are always re-rendered.

To be perfectly honest, you might want to think about hard-drive upgrades in your future planning. Unless you're absolutely ruthless with your image retention policy, you're just going to keep filling up hard drives. At least, I do.