Evening all... While copying my catalog to a new location, I just noticed my Lr catalog is 1GB and the previews are 25GB. How can I trim this down a bit?
Also, what is TOO big of a catalog size? I'm migrating the catalog to a SSD.
Also, just want to make sure/confirm that all of my edits are contained in the catalog NOT the previews, just incase I lose the previews.
THANKS for any info.
My catalogue is 3.3GB in size (for around 77,000 images), and I have currently 5G in previews. My SSD C drive is 256G, and so I'm not concerned about the space used by Lightroom.
So far as the catalog size is concerned: there's nothing you can do about that except remove images. If you let LR backup at least weekly (IMHO one should do that) then it will at that time remove redundant space from the catalog, but there's no speed penalty in having a large catalog. Size is unlikely to be an issue unless one uses a small SSD (128G), which I wouldn't recommend anyway.
For previews: I'm surprised you have 25G. Do you have a high res display, 4K for example? Mine is 1920x1200.
You can control preview space somewhat. In Edit -> Catalog Settings -> File Handling, set a smaller Standard Preview Size if necessary. I leave it at "Auto" and Preview Quality to "Medium". If you have a 4K display and you don't want so much space taken by previews then you could set the standard preview size to something smaller. Also make sure "Automatically Discard 1:1 Previews" is set at (for example) "After 30 Days".
However, if you like you can simply delete the all previews and let LR start again. In the folder containing the catalog, if you delete the sub-folder "Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata" then that deletes the previews, and when LR wants to display an image in Library Module, if the preview isn't there it simply recreates another. It's obviously slower to display an image if it has to create the preview, but it will reduce the size taken at least temporarily.
