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.

Hmm I only have ~30k photos in my catalogue. But my previews file is 66gb. I guess it's mostly from the smart preview files.

On 6/6/2025 at 1:27 PM, jjmochi said:

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?

That is a huge increase. My Raw files are 17 MB and the processed tif (with layers) is about 100 MB when stored as an 8 bit file with LZW compression. so a 6 x increase. doing similar with an 80MB file should make a 470 MB file. Is the file 8 bit or 16 bit? does it have layers? Also note that apparently the compression algorithms don't make 16 bit files smaller for seem reason and can even make it larger.

This is what I don't like about Lightroom - all of this storage stuff is opaque, it's not immediately obvious how it is taking up so much space. Adobe is not really interested in solving storage problems - their answer is "storage is cheap".

On the topic of disk space, I assume you empty the trash regularly. I try to go through my images when I upload them and throw out the unusable and also duplicates etc. Doing this in capture one they end up in the session trash and the raws don't get deleted but get put in the trash. I believe Lightroom does something similar. I just hit throw out trash on my setup and the main drive folder reduced in size 2.38 to 2.18 TB deleting 61,000 files. I know it's been a while but I certainly didn't delete anywhere that amount of image files - it's all the add-on files the system produces. The 0.2 TB would represent about 11,000 Raw images for me. I looked at my main image folder - it has 19,000 files, 10,000 of them are in the Capture One folder. It's worth doing a bit of digging to see where all of this is hiding.

Hi jjmochi

I’m a long, long term LR user and could offer a couple of thoughts:

As Chris suggests, I do wonder if Adobe just reckon data storage is cheap - just get more. That said, Apple data storage ain’t cheap. (I can hear @makar0n chuckling). So when I switched from a Mac with 3TB to a new machine, I didn’t want to pay the huge increase in bigger SSD costs.

I now run the LR prog on my MacStudio but all the image files (approx 56,000 pretty much all RAW files plus TIFFs and Panos totalling about 1.8TB) are on an external 4TB SSD. I’ve experimented with the program on and off the Studio but found this current combination works best. The only issue I find is that if you do a full search of the images, it can take a little time till all the actual images are visible as you scroll through the search results.

I only keep 3-4 iterations of the LR backup - which is held on a different external drive. These go back maybe 3 months which, to me, is plenty.

However large your collection, I’d suggest keeping everything in just one catalog unless you can make a very clear divide between very different elements of work. But even then, I’d hesitate. Being able to search the catalog globally seems to me one of the great features of LR.

As Chris comments, tracking down exactly what data is where can be a little tricky with LR. But I’ve found using the combination above has kept me out of despair.

3 hours ago, Chris Ross said:

their answer is "storage is cheap".

It's not totaly false. 20 TB or more for less as 400 €

I looked on my drive. over the last years I used "only" 800 GB in 1 year... I shoot a lot and for the moment didn't delete more than 5 % of the raw
Why? Disk space is sheap

I can probably delete more than 50 % and why not 80 % of the picture but it take time and i don't have time for that.

2 hours ago, TimG said:

However large your collection, I’d suggest keeping everything in just one catalog unless you can make a very clear divide between very different elements of work. But even then, I’d hesitate. Being able to search the catalog globally seems to me one of the great features of LR.

I have only one catalog it work really good. And that on a more than 0 years "old" PC under windows 10 with 32 GB RAM.

18.6 GB for all the pictures I took over the years 164720 pictures

I agree with you it is a great feature of LR to be able searching ALL my picture in one step... and that very fast.

There is clearly a lot of variability in how people use LR. The lrcat file is generally rather small even in my case with 0.7 million pix. It is the previews file that takes up space and there are choices in how one does this. Some are big while others are small. One can set 1:1 previews to expire as well, which I did not do at first.

One can delete the previews file which is the equivalent of starting from a backup file. I did this only once and that was years ago - when I did a version upgrade. The trouble was that I only saw grey rectangles until the previews were regenerated which can take some time - happened when clicking on the folder in library mode. The images appeared sequentially as they were generated. I had only a few 10s of thousand images back then.

Just for laughs I have more images of three of the Pacific salmon species than Tim has in his entire catalog - see attachment. Note the large space to the left - those are the higher taxonomic categories further up from order (Salmoniformes). Be thankful if you are not a biology nerd!!!!!! BTW you will note that I have the common name at the bottom of the hierarchy so I only have to type in "so" for Sockeye Salmon and LR does the rest, which I do when importing into LR. If I used the scientific name I would have to correctly spell the genus name and at least one species name letter to get LR to pick the right keyword.

Edited Sunday at 05:55 PM4 days by Tom Kline

20 hours ago, TimG said:

However large your collection, I’d suggest keeping everything in just one catalog unless you can make a very clear divide between very different elements of work. But even then, I’d hesitate. Being able to search the catalog globally seems to me one of the great features of LR.

You can also do this in your file manager if you name your processed images with species or area or whatever fits best and you can utilise the directory structure to keep it in some sort of order. Searching that is also quite fast, though for Windows users the MS file explorer can be present problems (like the green ribbon of death) so I use Directory opus a third party file management software. I can search from the every top of directory tree to find the file I want.

If an image is properly named I can find it no time at all. Going back to the Raw file takes a little longer - I store these by date and area and using the EXIF data I can get back to the Raw images pretty quickly as well. The advantage of this system is it is transparent - not all tied up in a proprietary format.

I store all my processed files as a full size layered tiff so it's easy to go back and tweak the editing.

2 hours ago, Chris Ross said:

You can also do this in your file manager if you name your processed images with species or area or whatever fits best and you can utilise the directory structure to keep it in some sort of order. Searching that is also quite fast, though for Windows users the MS file explorer can be present problems (like the green ribbon of death) so I use Directory opus a third party file management software. I can search from the every top of directory tree to find the file I want.

If an image is properly named I can find it no time at all. Going back to the Raw file takes a little longer - I store these by date and area and using the EXIF data I can get back to the Raw images pretty quickly as well. The advantage of this system is it is transparent - not all tied up in a proprietary format.

I store all my processed files as a full size layered tiff so it's easy to go back and tweak the editing.

One reason for using LR is to avoid having to do all that. As well one can make multiple virtual collections based on alternative key word types for example, location, common name, scientific name, phase of the moon, month, year.....

About 20 years ago I followed the example of of an "expert" whose used date and grouped by quality with selects in one folder etc. This became a nightmare... This was before LR came out. Thankfully it saved the day but those early files are still a mess.

I have been using consecutively numbered folders and file names (generated when I took the pic) with separate ones for each camera. Larger folders for years. If a certain camera is used a lot in a given year there may be A, B, C folders for that camera that year. Separate folders makes it easier to collapse the list of files when looking at them inside LR. It also makes it much easier to keep track of things when doing back ups. Missing numbers are easy to detect.

Edited Monday at 04:00 AM3 days by Tom Kline

49 minutes ago, Tom Kline said:

One reason for using LR is to avoid having to do all that. As well one can make multiple virtual collections based on alternative key word types for example, location, common name, scientific name, phase of the moon, month, year.....

About 20 years ago I followed the example of of an "expert" whose used date and grouped by quality with selects in one folder etc. This became a nightmare... This was before LR came out. Thankfully it saved the day but those early files are still a mess.

I have been using consecutively numbered folders and file names (generated when I took the pic) with separate ones for each camera. Larger folders for years. If a certain camera is used a lot in a given year there may be A, B, C folders for that camera that year. Separate folders makes it easier to collapse the list of files when looking at them inside LR. It also makes it much easier to keep track of things when doing back ups. Missing numbers are easy to detect.

I've no doubt it works well for a lot of people. I'm happy with what I'm doing and I think it suits some people better than others - no judgement just do what you find works! I believe Capture One can do something similar but I haven't dug and explored how to do it as yet.