Lightroom previews folder structure

[Montanawildlives]

In my previews.lrdata folder, I have 16 subfolders (0 through 9 and A through F). Each of these has either 4072 subfolders (e.g., 9A00, 9A05, etc.). Nearly all of these 65,152 subfolders is empty. The only nonempty ones contain the actual thousand or so active preview files (set to delete after 30 days).

Maybe I'm weird, but I don't like having 64,000 empty folders on my hard drive. I realize that since they are empty, they aren't taking up a ton of space, but....64,000?!?!?

Could this slow things down and is it normal?

If I delete my lrdata folder entirely I'll lose all my current previews, any other consequences?

Thanks.

 

[jfriend00]

You can simulate deleting them all by simply renaming the top level directory of the previews hieararchy (when LR is not running) and then running LR to see if there are any ill effects. If so, you can shut-down LR and rename it back. If no ill effects, you then delete the renamed hierarchy.

 

[dj_paige]

You can simulate deleting them all by simply renaming the top level directory of the previews hieararchy (when LR is not running) and then running LR to see if there are any ill effects. If so, you can shut-down LR and rename it back. If no ill effects, you then delete the renamed hierarchy.

If you delete it or rename it, then Lightroom will re-create it.

This is perfectly normal and expected folder structure for Lightroom previews, and you would be wise to leave it alone.

 

[jfriend00]

You can simulate deleting them all by simply renaming the top level directory of the previews hieararchy (when LR is not running) and then running LR to see if there are any ill effects. If so, you can shut-down LR and rename it back. If no ill effects, you then delete the renamed hierarchy.

If you delete it or rename it, then Lightroom will re-create it.

Yes, expected. The OP would be using this to make sure there are no hidden gotchas with removing the whole directory hierarchy. It's a way to test their desired cleanup action in a reversible way which seems a sensible precaution to take.

This is perfectly normal and expected folder structure for Lightroom previews, and you would be wise to leave it alone.

60,000 empty folders is not a good behavior by any software. If LR really was designed to do that on purpose, that's a less than desirable design decision (probably just lazy developers not cleaning up after themselves). It's just making clutter in the file system for no benefit.

As Adobe seems to generally have little respect for good housekeeping on your system (installing all sorts of services that steal CPU cycles and battery when no Adobe application is running), this wouldn't surprise me if they were that sloppy. So, I do sympathize with the OP's interest in cleaning up after a messy program.

--
John