Selecting and deleting RAW files (to save disk space)

[process]

Operating System

1. Other (please note in thread)

My personal photo collection in Lightroom is getting way too big, and I'm looking into ways of making it smaller.
A lot of it is shot in RAW, but thinking about it I don't need a RAW file of every casual snapshot, but rather just for very special moments and studio shots etc.
There's obviously the option of deleting lots and lots of unnecessary photos, but that's too much work for now.

So, how do I go ahead with this?
My photos are all organized in a physical folder structure (year, month, description of event). The even description (folder name) is used to keyword all the photos within, using a nice free script kindly shared by John Bearsworth.
I chose not to use Collections so as not to be reliant on a proprietory organizing format, but rather a file structure which can easily be used with other photo organizing software (or even the MacOS Finder) if I should ever stop using Lightroom for some reason. I have however edited many photos using Lightroom's Development module and used "virtual copies" for multiple edits, so I'm not sure how that would pan out if I move over to something other than Lightroom.
Apart from RAW files, JPGs and PNGs there's also MP4 videos. I've also organized files that Lightroom can't itself read, within the same file structure (such as PDF files, for instance a related document from an event I've taken photos/videos from). These aren't even recognized by Lightroom, so I've created several icon images (PNG files) which read "PDF documents within this folder" or "Audio files within this folder" and so on, and placed the appropriate ones inside the folders with that filetype. That way, when I see such an icon image in Lightroom I can just right-click and "Show in Finder" to access its contents:

I'm thinking that I first need to get an overview of all RAW files available (which I've already created a filter for):

But then there's the question if any RAW files have a JPG copy or not. I've tried my best to manually keep only RAW files (some cameras create both RAWs and JPGs), but I might have missed some. Is there a way I can use the filter to show all photos that have a RAW and JPG equivalent? Or all RAW files that have been used to create a virtual copy and/or a TIFF edit copy done in Photoshop.

That should take care of the dependencies, so now's the time to decide which RAWs to delete, which ones to keep (as they are), and which ones to convert to JPG, then delete the source RAWs.
Regarding the last step it might be an idea to have those RAWs placed in sub-folders for a while (instead of being deleted right away), so I have the opportunity to change my mind further down the road, until I'm sure I actually do want to delete them.

Well, that's my general idea on how to get started with this, but I'm sure others have done similar cleanups and might have other, better suggestions.
I'm on Lightroom 6.14 on a Mac with MacOS 10.14 Mojave.

 

[BobMc]

You haven’t said how many images you have, the space they consume, or the size of your storage.

That could help us understand your full situation.

BobMc

 

[process]

Lightroom tells me I have around 258 000 files which includes the following formats:
RAW
JPG
DNG (Digital negative)
PSD (Photoshop)
TIFF
Video
PNG

The folder which contains all these photos and subfolders add up to around 6 TB on my drive.
In addition to the above that folder also contains subfolders with files that Lightroom can't read (PDF, MP3 audio files and so on), but I suppose the majority of disk space is used by the RAW files.

It all seems like a daunting task, but today I started preparing by removing all color-labels from any RAW file and replacing it with star ratings. This should make it easier for me to review which RAW files to delete (by using color labels).

 

[Gnits]

The fact you are comfortable using the metadata grid is a very good start.

I have 180k images, the majority raw and a substantially smaller number of jpgs, tiffs, dngs and psd’s..

I use a very similar folder structure to yours, ie mine is by year and then projects chronologically within year.

I use flags and rating to grade my images.
First pass.. flag as rejects…out of focus and poor exposure images.
2nd Pass.. using the filter.. exclude all rejects.. and flag any potential keeper with a 1 star.
3rd Pass.. filter only 1 star and grade the better images with a 2 star. Because you have opted to select only 1 stars the selected 2 stars disappear from the grid or loupe view. This makes it easy to cycle thru multiple times. Mostly .. I have my project keepers at this stage.. but if high volume of keeps proceed to 4th or 5th pass.
4th pass. Select only 2 stars. Mark the better images with a 3 star.

I regard all ratings as relative to the project, not to my entire catalog. If I encounter a truely super shot.. I allow myself give it a 5 star rating. This means I will treat this with extra effort.. and may ultimately it is a 4 star or 3 star (maybe the image is vg, but there are other competing images in this batch and I only want to award top rating to the very best). For a particular project it is likely I have no 5 star rated images.

So.. the above is my starting point. And the majority of images in my project folders have been thru this process.

In the above scenario.. I regard all zero rated images as potential for deletion. I have no plans to delete any of my raw images for several reasons (1. I have plenty of storage to cope with several more years of shooting without worrying about storage limits and 2. Software keeps getting better and images poorly graded 10 years ago may become hero images tomorrow).

Finally..99% of the time.. all tiffs, dngs, psds stay in the same folder as their parent raw file. I regard these as close to negative status. All derivative files, eg jpgs for email /web, tiffs for prints, etc.. are stored in subfolders of the main project folder. I never delete these. I created these for a purpose and generally speaking these represent the end point of my effort to capture and edit my images. They are a tiny percentage of the total library disk space used.

So.. getting back to the metadata grid… I have a preset grid layout which includes date, filetype, flag and rating. I have this grid locked .. so that grid is used by me in all my folders and collections. It means it is really easy to slice and dice my images and really quickly zone in to the top images in a project. By adding rating to your grid you can make use that as a tool for your selection.

If I want to browse my best images, I click on All Photos collection and click 5 star.

The above approach works for real or virtual images and does not exclude the option to use collections, keywords and metadata to further refine the dna of the image.

 

[clee01l]

Disk Space is cheap. Throwing away good originals is IMO foolhardy.

I have images going back to 2007 when I got my first digital camera. I only wish that I had the wisdom of shooting RAW from the beginning. As Adobe has improved the Lightroom features I have continually revisited these images and reprocessed them. Today, I probably reprocess more images than I shoot new.

I would suggest this:

1. Use the Assisted Culling process to evaluate all of your images. If there is no reasonable effort available to save the image or unless it has some special value, then discard the image. Be aggressive in culling. Remember you are only going to be keeping 1st generation originals be thay RAW or an RGB file type.
2. Any derivative JPEGs that can be recreated from the original using the export option, discard. Derivative images serve only one purpose and that is at the destination. If the destination is Social Media, Slideshow or web site, this is where the derivative belongs. New copies can always be recreated by making a new export.
3. Remember a JPEG is an 8 bit color, lossy, 1st or worse generation from the original RAW captured by the camera. With the JPEG, you have already thrown away half of the colors captured by the camera

Once you have done these things, Then look at your disk consumption If you are still tight on disk space, buy more

 

[BobMc]

Clee01I - said: Disk Space is cheap.

I have a 20TB drive from B&H that costs $814.88 ( I use Win 11)

You said you use a Mac.

The “Glyph Technologies 20TB Blackbox PRO USB 3.2 Gen 2 External Hard Drive”

is make for a Mac and costs $899.99 at B&H – Follow link above.

Oh, that 20TB drive, I have 2 so I can have a full backup of the 1st one.

BobMc

 

[clee01l]

I have a 20TB drive from B&H that costs $814.88 ( I use Win 11)

I got my 20TB HDD in June 2025 for $290. I have 63TB available on my Mac Studio and 26TB sitting idle in two DAS boxes. Another 40TB is available on my NAS.

I only buy Bare drives and Thunderbolt 4/5 multi bay DAS. I agree the prices are not where they were a year ago but no one should waste money buying some one else's case to put the drive in.

 

[Gnits]

I am seriously shocked by current Hdd prices.. luckily I have enough storage for a year or two or three.. but was hoping to replace my current drives in the near future.. so monitoring prices every month or so.. hoping the Ai bubble bursts soon or real world capacity expands to cope. Some main production bought a year in advance and never gets to market.

 

[BobMc]

I went back to look. My 20TB drive was $325.66 in Feb, of 2025

 

[process]

The fact you are comfortable using the metadata grid is a very good start.

Thank you.
Yes, I've found it a very useful aid in organizing my images/videos. Thanks to various forum postings (and a great deal of trial/error and patience) I've created a number of filtering presets which help me check and filter my files. I had a huge backlog of unorganized images to go through, but have finally managed to organize all of them by giving them an "event" type description, collectively for all the images within that specific event's folder. I know that ideally I should keyword every single image individually, but that would just be too much work, so I found this to be a good middle-ground.
Some of my filters are used to do a final check to see if any images are missing keywords or no creator, and finally a check to see if the metadata has been saved.

I have 180k images, the majority raw and a substantially smaller number of jpgs, tiffs, dngs and psd’s..

I use a very similar folder structure to yours, ie mine is by year and then projects chronologically within year.

By "projects" do you mean what I've called "events"?
In other words a short description of whatever you've photographed such as a birthday, a vacation or whatever.

Here's what my file structure looks like:

For larger "events" such as a whole summer vacation I usually create multiple sub-folders each with a descriptive name of what that specific day or happening is about.
I find John Beardsworth's folder to keyword script (which I linked to in my first posting in this thread) absolutely essential for giving all my images/videos the same keywords as their folders. I've modified it and have now two slightly different versions of this script:

My modified scripts aren't perfect, so I still have to copy/paste some folder names depending on being sub-folders or not.
For event folders that are grouped as sub-folders, sub-sub-folders and so on I use the names of that entire folder-hierarchy as the keywords for the images/videos within.
The "full path" script helps here, but I haven't succeeded in modifying it just like I want (to not copy the complete path, but omit the ones beyond what the root folder I've shown in LR is. Still, these scripts lighten the burden considerably.

I use flags and rating to grade my images.

This is something I've been doing very poorly and have a lot to learn.
I appreciate your detailed explanations and will look further into this.

In the above scenario.. I regard all zero rated images as potential for deletion. I have no plans to delete any of my raw images for several reasons (1. I have plenty of storage to cope with several more years of shooting without worrying about storage limits and 2.

When you say you never delete any RAW images, does this mean you also have JPG/TIFF copies, and those are the ones you rate and potentially delete?
Or do you still delete RAW images that are "obvious" zero rated such as unfocused shots, shots that are virtually identical to another shot you do want to keep etc?

Software keeps getting better and images poorly graded 10 years ago may become hero images tomorrow).

That's a good point!

Finally..99% of the time.. all tiffs, dngs, psds stay in the same folder as their parent raw file. I regard these as close to negative status. All derivative files, eg jpgs for email /web, tiffs for prints, etc.. are stored in subfolders of the main project folder. I never delete these. I created these for a purpose and generally speaking these represent the end point of my effort to capture and edit my images. They are a tiny percentage of the total library disk space used.

I see what you mean.
However, if you never delete any RAW files, how do you keep your photos from taking up unnecessarily much disk space?

My initial idea (for reclaiming disk space) was to convert the majority of my RAWs to JPG, then delete the RAWs. This would apply to general snapshots etc. but not specific "photo shoots" or "photography" type photos where I most certainly would need the RAWs for later.
But after reading your and others' replies here it opened my mind to getting into the whole rating thing, and delete whichever photos I definitely won't ever need, regardless of file format.

But the tricky thing for me is to find the criteria upon deciding which ones I should keep and which ones to trash. I'm talking about personal photos here (family, friends, hobbies, vacations etc.) and not professional work.
I'm personally invested in them, and my decision is clouded by subjectivity unlike paid work where the criteria is more objective and easier to decide upon.
So in the end I've kept just about everything just to be on the safe side. Hence my drives have been filling up.

Maybe the solution (for me) is figuring out a way to decide on how to rate, and delete the "losers" which would also remove RAW files (as most of my photos including my everyday snapshots) are RAW files. I've kept to the RAW format ever since I learnt about it years ago, "just in case", even though most of my personal photos are quick snapshots that I probably never will need the RAW file for.
A lot can be done in editing with a regular JPG as well.

Disk Space is cheap. Throwing away good originals is IMO foolhardy.

I understand what you mean, even though "cheap" for professional/paid photography can be different than for storing your personal/family photos and videos. Then there's the need of a similarly (or larger) sized backup drive (ideally two backup drives).

I noticed you said good originals -how do you decide on which photos aren't good, and can safely be deleted?

I've been thinking if I should look into a network storage system of some kind (NAS etc.).
I really have no personal experience with this, but it gave me some new ideas and I think might solve some of my current problems:

• regain several TB of storage space on my Mac Pro for normal computer use (my 10TB internal main drive is around 90% full)
• used as a media-server for the family (together with a cheap, old Mac Mini perhaps?) for viewing my LR-organized photos/videos on a TV, possibly with some other software than LR, but still used by LR for adding new photos, editing, adding keywords etc.
• allow for a quieter Mac Pro (my 10TB drive is a lot noisier than the smaller (3 or 4TB as far as I remember) drives I used in the past. I could repurpose the 10TB drive as a backup for my LR photos/videos, then re-use a couple of my older 4TB drives in my Mac Pro for daily use. The NAS drive would hold my LR photos/videos for viewing, editing and adding new photos

I have images going back to 2007 when I got my first digital camera. I only wish that I had the wisdom of shooting RAW from the beginning. As Adobe has improved the Lightroom features I have continually revisited these images and reprocessed them. Today, I probably reprocess more images than I shoot new.

My "problem" is kind of the opposite as I started shooting RAW almost as soon as I got my first DSLR, but really didn't get into organizing my photos until years later, and have never been any good at deleting things.

I would suggest this:

1. Use the Assisted Culling process to evaluate all of your images. If there is no reasonable effort available to save the image or unless it has some special value, then discard the image. Be aggressive in culling. Remember you are only going to be keeping 1st generation originals be thay RAW or an RGB file type.
2. Any derivative JPEGs that can be recreated from the original using the export option, discard. Derivative images serve only one purpose and that is at the destination. If the destination is Social Media, Slideshow or web site, this is where the derivative belongs. New copies can always be recreated by making a new export.
3. Remember a JPEG is an 8 bit color, lossy, 1st or worse generation from the original RAW captured by the camera. With the JPEG, you have already thrown away half of the colors captured by the camera

Once you have done these things, Then look at your disk consumption If you are still tight on disk space, buy more

All good suggestions!
I believe I need to seriously get into the culling process.

I've already received a lot of good advice in regards to the practical and technical aspects of doing that, but I think the biggest challenge for me is how to decide upon "which of my children to discard" so to speak among all the photos and videos I've got a personal attachement to. I guess there's no right or wrong answer for this, but would be open for advice and personal experience from anyone reading this.

 

[Gnits]

I will reply to other points in other posts, if necessary.

My folder structure is probably very close to yours ... eg

2025 Images
678-SunriseInDeathValley
679-JoeBloggsExtensionProject
680-WeekEndTripToWestOfIrl
2026 Images
681-FamilyChristmasPics
682-MultiDayMultiPhotographerProject

A project could be a single day event, a trip, a multi day collaborative project. If it is a personal multiday trip it may have subfolders per day or per location, etc.

Notice that I give all my projects a short name that makes sense to me and a unique sequential project number. The advantage of having a sequential number is a) I have a unique reference to that folder, regardless of its description or year. b). It means all projects are stored chronologically within each year. Works a treat.. and I may have multiple projects that may contain the same name, be that a client, a friend, camera club or other entity. So.. easy to find all projects for a particular purpose.

I see what you mean.
However, if you never delete any RAW files, how do you keep your photos from taking up unnecessarily much disk space?

I no longer keep jpg versions of raw.. and shoot raw 99% of the time. Any exported jpgs, tiffs, psd, dngs represent the end point and are the real fruits of my labours and will never be deleted. I do not subscribe to the idea that I can always regenerate these. I created them at a point in time. I may further edit an image and or use revised versions of software , reuse an image for a different project. Then the revised version and its children begin their life and are retained by me. Also, I always want to retain the versions of images I have sent to others, whether that is casual email or large pdfs for large high quality prints. When exporting from LrC.. it is real easy to rename the exported subfolder name. I will put the name of the recipient in this and maybe name and date if I send multiple images to the same or different people over a period of time. It means the subfolders of my project folder tells the full story of the output from that project folder.

I am not a high volume shooter and I am not dealing with fee paying clients on a regular basis. My background is large scale enterprise computing and I have built commercial systems for small, medium and multinational clients. If I was operating at a commercial level, then I would regard cost of storage as a fundamental cost of doing business. Most of my work is personal... but the cost of my flights and hotels and car rentals is a fraction of the cost of the storage used to capture the images.

People that shoot commercially will have small print in their contracts as to exactly what their responsibilities are. Once they deliver the agreed package of images they may hold them for a few months and then have a routine for clearing out old projects. Some people offer an archiving service, where they keep images (say for a fixed term eg a year). In a prior period.. people saved customer projects to cds or dvds or thumb drives.

If I was working commercially, I might consider backing up to tape.. It has a modest cost of entry to buy the tape drive and archiving software, but low running costs and easy to file in a fireproof safe.

I have often travelled with serious wildlife photographers, who are using a9iii and similar cameras at up to 120 frames per second. These people can shoot 20k images in the morning and repeat again in the evening. Their problem is often having enough cards to keep up with their shooting frame rates. These people will look for the hero image in a burst of 300 images.. flag it.. or mark the burst for deletion. I have increasingly seen photographers do this decluttering in camera before they ingest the cards to a computer (ie remove a complete burst.. because they know they missed focus or exposure or the magic moment).



But after a project or a trip, I will review the rejected images (ie first pass obvious rejects) .. as a final check and then delete them. Everything else I keep... I know the cost of storage has rocketed, especially external SSDs... and I reckon a 20TB spinning drive is now approx 1000€ or $. Probably double what it was 18 months ago. A 20TB hdd will store approx 400,000 images, so approx cost of 0.0025€ per image.

Plus.. it will take me another 20 years for me to consume that much storage.

So for me .. I am not worried about storage.

Final point... I know lots of people who are worried about storage.. but mainly because there archives are a mess, spread over lots and lots of disks and storage is purchased on a per trip or per project basis. That is a stressful situation.

 

[Gnits]

an "event" type description,

That is a good idea.. and could be implemented in a number of ways (eg Keywords.).. The issue with keywords is they have to be applied at image level, not folder level.

This is something I've been doing very poorly and have a lot to learn.
I appreciate your detailed explanations and will look further into this.

This evolved... and made mistakes on the way.. Biggest mistake.. forget that a metadata tag is active when you think you are looking at all images in a collection or folder.. but after making that mistake a few times.. one gets adept at slicing and dicing (or grading).

 

[clee01l]

I understand what you mean, even though "cheap" for professional/paid photography can be different than for storing your personal/family photos and videos. Then there's the need of a similarly (or larger) sized backup drive (ideally two backup drives).

I've got HDDs that are 15 years old. I don't use these for mission critical work but that are available for some temporary uses. For example my Photoshop Scratch disk is 11 years old. I use it the Photoshop scratch disk and for storing my Backup Classic catalogs

I noticed you said good originals -how do you decide on which photos aren't good, and can safely be deleted?

The Previously mentioned "Assisted Culling" feature helps. Most digital photographers will shoot several versions of the same subject. The goals here is to force the issue and decide which one or two images in the stack you keep and which get discarded. About 18 months ago I took my master catalog of ~75,000 images and selected about 15,000 of my best photos for inclusion in the Adobe Cloud. Once Isolated, I created a new master catalog and migrated it to Lightroom Desktop so that I have full size images in the Adobe Cloud for Adobe Portfolio. The 60,000 images that I did not use are held in a reserve catalog and as I work with the more managable 15K images, I discovered some originals that were missing. I was able to recover them. When DeNoise first was released, it created an intermediate DNG. Now that the intermediate file has been omitted, I have gone back and reprorcessed the originals with the new DeNoise allowing me to delete the Enhanced DNGs.

I've been thinking if I should look into a network storage system of some kind (NAS etc.).
I really have no personal experience with this, but it gave me some new ideas and I think might solve some of my current problems:

• regain several TB of storage space on my Mac Pro for normal computer use (my 10TB internal main drive is around 90% full)
• used as a media-server for the family (together with a cheap, old Mac Mini perhaps?) for viewing my LR-organized photos/videos on a TV, possibly with some other software than LR, but still used by LR for adding new photos, editing, adding keywords etc.
• allow for a quieter Mac Pro (my 10TB drive is a lot noisier than the smaller (3 or 4TB as far as I remember) drives I used in the past. I could repurpose the 10TB drive as a backup for my LR photos/videos, then re-use a couple of my older 4TB drives in my Mac Pro for daily use. The NAS drive would hold my LR photos/videos for viewing, editing and adding new photos

I have a NAS. It has 4 Bays and not formatted as a RAID device. Set up as a JBOD gives me 40TB of NAS storage. One of those is reserved for timeMachine backups and another is holding those 60K images in reserve. A NAS is a good device to use for data that does not need frequent or fast access.

My "problem" is kind of the opposite as I started shooting RAW almost as soon as I got my first DSLR, but really didn't get into organizing my photos until years later, and have never been any good at deleting things.

That probably includes most of us. Those 60,000 images I mentioned could be deleted. I'm glad that I did not delete them outright since I later discovered originals were missing from some of the 15,000 I decided to keep.

All good suggestions!
I believe I need to seriously get into the culling process.

I've already received a lot of good advice in regards to the practical and technical aspects of doing that, but I think the biggest challenge for me is how to decide upon "which of my children to discard" so to speak among all the photos and videos I've got a personal attachement to. I guess there's no right or wrong answer for this, but would be open for advice and personal experience from anyone reading this.

I'm doing it in stages.. As mentioned the 60,000 images and catalog associated catalog was sent to reserve just in case I overlooked some things important (AND I DID).. Since these are out of my immediate workflow, I can, as time permits, review these for importance. Notice the goal has never been to conserve disk space but instead to remove distractions from my best photos.

 

[process]

Once again, thank you to all who've replied!
It's a lot to take in, but lots of good pointers. I'm guessing that a lot (my currently biggest challenge being the actual culling process -what to keep, what to delete) is a matter of practicing. Maybe the best way to get started is just to mark the ones I believe I want to trash as "rejected" (the "X" key), but without actually deleting them afterwards. Instead, just leave them like that for a while so I have the opportunity to change my mind.

I've got HDDs that are 15 years old. I don't use these for mission critical work but that are available for some temporary uses. For example my Photoshop Scratch disk is 11 years old. I use it the Photoshop scratch disk and for storing my Backup Classic catalogs

I was thinking about drives that were several years old, but had very little actual use.
Or do mechanical hard drives have a specified lifespan from their production dates, regardless of having been in actual use or not?
I've found DriveDX to be very useful in determining if a drive is safe to use or not.

The Previously mentioned "Assisted Culling" feature helps. Most digital photographers will shoot several versions of the same subject. The goals here is to force the issue and decide which one or two images in the stack you keep and which get discarded. About 18 months ago I took my master catalog of ~75,000 images and selected about 15,000 of my best photos for inclusion in the Adobe Cloud. Once Isolated, I created a new master catalog and migrated it to Lightroom Desktop so that I have full size images in the Adobe Cloud for Adobe Portfolio. The 60,000 images that I did not use are held in a reserve catalog and as I work with the more managable 15K images, I discovered some originals that were missing. I was able to recover them. When DeNoise first was released, it created an intermediate DNG. Now that the intermediate file has been omitted, I have gone back and reprorcessed the originals with the new DeNoise allowing me to delete the Enhanced DNGs.

That's a pretty impressive feat, but one I'd like to aim for!
I understand the "assisted culling" feature you're referring to is something found in the current version of Lightroom, and not in my version 6.14.

But it gave me a thought: even though I have no intention of subscribing to it from Adobe I could probably use it for a little while just to organize my existing 6.14 library, and when done continue using 6.14 for viewing and further importing/editing/organizing. For backwards compatibility I could just rename (or create a backup copy of) the .lrcat file (I assume the newer version of Lightroom will upgrade it but render it incompatible with the earlier 6.14 version), then, after having used the current version to help cull my photos, rename the 6.14 .lrcat file back to its original filename, run 6.14 and do a "Synchronize folder" at the topmost folder level in order to remove all the photos that I removed with the newer Lightroom version.

From what I've heard it's perfectly possible to subscribe to Lightroom for say just a month, then cancel. The bigger challenge is that the current version probably won't even run on my ageing Mac and MacOS version.

I have a NAS. It has 4 Bays and not formatted as a RAID device. Set up as a JBOD gives me 40TB of NAS storage. One of those is reserved for timeMachine backups and another is holding those 60K images in reserve. A NAS is a good device to use for data that does not need frequent or fast access.

This sounds like a good solution for me as well.
May I ask which brand/model you decided on? The Synology ones appear to come up a lot in recommendations, and I think multiple bays might be a good idea for flexibility (and I wouldn't need to populate all those 4 bays to begin with either, if set up in a JBOD configuration as yours).

 

[clee01l]

Once again, thank you to all who've replied!
It's a lot to take in, but lots of good pointers. I'm guessing that a lot (my currently biggest challenge being the actual culling process -what to keep, what to delete) is a matter of practicing. Maybe the best way to get started is just to mark the ones I believe I want to trash as "rejected" (the "X" key), but without actually deleting them afterwards. Instead, just leave them like that for a while so I have the opportunity to change my mind.

I do not delete physical files until my workflow is complete. On import I start the culling process during the import process just marking rejects. In develop I review the edit process and reject some of the images that do not meet an acceptable level of quality. Once I have exported my best images I review the rest for near duplicates and reject these. After 2-3 months I review the rejected images to see if I still feel they should be rejected. About 2-3 months after I have completed my workflow. some times mush later, I will review the Rejected images again and delete them.

I was thinking about drives that were several years old, but had very little actual use.
Or do mechanical hard drives have a specified lifespan from their production dates, regardless of having been in actual use or not?
I've found DriveDX to be very useful in determining if a drive is safe to use or not.

HDDs are going to be limited by the number of read/writes. The average lifespan of a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is typically 3 to 5 years under normal daily usage. Mechanical wear and Oxide flaking account for most EoL disks. That's a pretty impressive feat, but one I'd like to aim for!

I understand the "assisted culling" feature you're referring to is something found in the current version of Lightroom, and not in my version 6.14.

But it gave me a thought: even though I have no intention of subscribing to it from Adobe I could probably use it for a little while just to organize my existing 6.14 library, and when done continue using 6.14 for viewing and further importing/editing/organizing. For backwards compatibility I could just rename (or create a backup copy of) the .lrcat file (I assume the newer version of Lightroom will upgrade it but render it incompatible with the earlier 6.14 version), then, after having used the current version to help cull my photos, rename the 6.14 .lrcat file back to its original filename, run 6.14 and do a "Synchronize folder" at the topmost folder level in order to remove all the photos that I removed with the newer Lightroom version.

From what I've heard it's perfectly possible to subscribe to Lightroom for say just a month, then cancel. The bigger challenge is that the current version probably won't even run on my ageing Mac and MacOS version.



This sounds like a good solution for me as well.
May I ask which brand/model you decided on? The Synology ones appear to come up a lot in recommendations, and I think multiple bays might be a good idea for flexibility (and I wouldn't need to populate all those 4 bays to begin with either, if set up in a JBOD configuration as yours).

Your LR6 catalog file has a different database structure. LrC v15.x can read this old database but it will need to write out a copy of the Catalog in the v15 database structure. This structure is not compatible with LR6 app. So you will only be able to use the v15 features in a V15 or later app. Your old computer cannot run modern apps. LrC v15 needs macOS Sonoma (version 14.x) or later. Your V10 MacOS is long out of Apple Support and Adobe only provides support for its app on operating systems that Apple still supports.