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Multiple/Duplicate Catalogs

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bobbabe

Active Member
Joined
Dec 28, 2015
Messages
117
Location
New York City
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
LR 6.9
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.14 Mojave
Hello- I'm using Mojave 10.14.2 on an iMac which has a 3 T fusion drive. It seems that my drive has only 400gb of free space left. I checked the "Manage Storage" function and see that I have what appears to be multiple catalogs with the same name and (almost) identical sizes. All are considered "documents" . I posting three screen shots to hopefully make this more clear. The cagtalog I created "Jerrys Problensolving Catalog" is actually the most recent one I made in the hopes of better organizing my work and in a sense starting over. I use Time Machine for my regular backups and yet another external drive for my photos, using Carbon Copy Cloner-( I have to fine tune exactly what is needed for those also but thats a secondary question). Before importing even more photos from a recent Africa trip, I want to do what I can to free up space in my internal drive without losing original images if possible. Any help will be appreciated.
 

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Looks like you have a lot of catalog backups. The default location of those is a folder called 'Backups' inside the catalog folder. So look for the original catalog folder (its default location is your Pictures folder) and then inside that folder for those backups. You can safely delete these, or delete most of them and keep just a few.
 
So do these catalogs really use as much space as indicated? I dont remember creating so many versions. I know I had to make several attempts at getting Lightroom working for me initially but this is more than I remember doing. Im pretty sure I saw on this site a way to move all my images in to just ONE catalog. I'll locate that info as soon as I make sureI'm not eliminating images i need. Thank you.
 
So do these catalogs really use as much space as indicated? I dont remember creating so many versions.
The sizes listed indicate about a 1/4 GB each. Not a significant amount when considering a 3TB fusion drive. Cataloged images have to be included and I notice some .MOV files Videos can be quite large.

In LR Preferences look at the name of the catalog that (should) be your master catalog. If it does contain all of your cataloged images and movies, then you can consider the other ".lrcat" files redundant or backup. I would move those to another drive if just temporarily and in the future make sure that the LR backup is written to another volume. As Johan has suggested, you can delete any backups that you know that you won't need. Another thing to look for is a Folder with a name similar to your catalog file and edit with ".lrdata". These are Previews and can be quite large. You only need to have the Previews folders associated with your master catalog. They will be in the same folder as your master catalog.
 
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