Hi

I'm using a Macbook Pro with 1TB of internal storage. I don't have much movies or other stuff on it.

Currently my workflow is to upload all the photos from a trip into LR, delete any not in focus/bad photos, end up with ~1000 raw files for a 1 week trip that I want to keep. From that 1000 I then pick ~200 to edit and export. Once I'm done editing the 200 photos from that trip I build smart previews for all 1000 photos, and move the original raw files for all 1000 into an external hard drive, keeping only the smart previews on my internal storage.

So this has worked well for me when I had my A7C but is becoming a problem after a few trips with my A7R5 due to the sheer size of the files.

I have ~20 trips worth of smart previews on my laptop + 1-2 trips of original raw files (=160GB) + 2000 raw files of my baby (=90GB) that I haven't gotten to editing yet and it's running out of storage. The raw files only add up to 250GB.

Lightroom folder itself is 100GB. Everything is in one catalog and it has backups going to 2022. The problem is I cannot find where the 100GB is coming from, each file I can see is only maybe 0.5GB at most. It's also gotten quite slow but I don't know where the bloat is?

Is there a more efficient way of doing this? Should I be creating separate catalogues for each trip (I do like having everything in one place tho)? How do I go about cleaning this up?

Thanks!

I don't use lightroom, however I expect the problem is that Lightroom catalog keeps records of everything and probably is not efficient at cleaning up the trash.

I have heard other say they make new catalogues and export everything to their main computer (with way more storage) and wipe the laptop clean. I think you are saying you only have one computer though - is this the case?

My workflow is somewhat different - I have a laptop for travel and a desktop at home. On the desktop I have Capture One plus PS. I do preliminary processing on Capture One and select images to fully process and save that on the main computer as a tif file. I also produce a a 1200 pixel long side jpeg which will be around 250 kB which is also stored on main computer. I could keep the JPEGs on my laptop as well but don't. I have a folder with 13,000 files (mostly jpeg) which takes up about 4GB. I think this demonstrates that Lightroom has a lot of overheads to maintain your smart previews, compared to storing a small web-size jpeg. This may be a solution that saves some size for you - I find I can find any file I want using file manager search functions as every file is named by subject.

I think keeping a master catalogues of everything on an external hard drive which is updated from a trip catalogue which can be wiped after updating the master would be what you need to do. Others could fill you in on the details of how to do this.

Thanks Chris. I have 2 computers - MacBook Pro which I prefer (better screen, easier workflow, can edit on trips etc) and a windows desktop at home (gaming desktop, should be very powerful but for some reason LR/PS is not much faster). I just got Backscatter xterminator and it was quite slow on my laptop hence I was playing around with swapping the catalog over to my desktop for hopefully faster edit.

I've now discovered that every time I run backscatter xterminator, PS turns a 80mb ARW file into a 1.3GB TIF file! Surely that can't be right? How large are your tif files?

I think I get what you mean - it's similar to what I'm doing except the master catalog lives on my laptop instead of the external hard drive.

I went through and deleted all my old backups - for reason my current catalog lived in one of the backup folders, took a while to sort out but now I got back ~30gb... Deleted all my old full size jpeg exports which already went into iCloud Photos and got back another 40gb...

19 minutes ago, jjmochi said:

I've now discovered that every time I run backscatter xterminator, PS turns a 80mb ARW file into a 1.3GB TIF file! Surely that can't be right? How large are your tif files?

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/61105226

This can help explain why .TIFF files are so large. Simply put, they are uncompressed.

To the OP: What are your catalog sizes? I have nearly 700K images in my LR library. The image data are on spinning hard drives, two 16 TB drives. This is after 2 decades of digital photography. Files created by PS like when using BSXT go with the raw data on these drives. I use regular previews. The smart ones are quite large is my understanding so do not bother with them. One of the attachments shows my various catalog sizes. Previews size is < 400GB (hard to read since I did some squishing to minimize area I was screen-grabbing.