Lightroom catalogs?

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AWills

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Hi everyone. I have never touched the Lightroom catalogs on my Mac, and I believe that they are now slowing the Mac down and taking up a LOT of memory.

I went to About this Mac / storage / documents and the following files are on there:

Lightroom Catalog.lrcat
Lightroom Catalog.lrcat.zip (there are five of these)

How can I manage these files? Should I keep them or remove them? How do you all manage these?

There is also a large file called Photoshop_13_LS16.dmg - what is this?

Also, all of the VSCO film presets I have purchased are listed as applications, if I move these to an external hard drive will they stop working in Lightroom?

Sorry lots of questions. I have unfortunately never taken the time to sort through the files!
 
I can't help with all your queries but;

The .lrcat.zip files should be your catalog backup's, it's up to you how many you keep but I generally only keep the most up to date one and delete the rest. You tell tell teh age by the folder they are found in, which should have the date it was created as the name.

The Photoshop_13_LS16.dmg file looks to be the disk image (install file) for Photoshop CS6 you will be able to delete that from your mac with no problems

I've never used any VSCO preset so unfortunately I can't help there but hopefully the above is enough to get going :)
 
.lrcat is your main catalogue file... leave it well alone.

The zip files are your backup files and you can safely delete all but the latest two files.

These files should not be taking up a lot of room on your hard disk, what can take up space are the preview files, what sort of previews are you generating on import?

Photoshop_13_LS16.dmg is the disk image file to install Photoshop CS6, have you got this installed? You will be quite safe moving this file to another drive.

Can't help with the VSCO presets as I don't use them, but I would imaging that if you move them they will cease to work.

Unless you have a very large catalogue it should not be slowing your computer, there it probably another reason behind any slowdown.
 
You could try optimising your catalogue to see if that makes any difference. Change the settings for the catalogue back up so that it automatically saves it to another drive if you have one. If you don't have a second drive then stick a flash drive/hard drive in and save to that.

Check to see if you have the delete previews set to never which can result in big folders.
 
Thanks everyone really helpful!

How do I make sure my backups are on a different disk?

I assumed it was storage slowing it down. I got the notification which says critically low storage space, and I’m currently in storage manager and there is 170gb of documents! The biggest files are Lightroom catalogs. I do have large images in my documents, but I didn’t think they were taking up too much space. I’m currently sifting through it all.

If I remove photos directly from Lightroom, does that remove them from the backup catalogs?
 
When you exit Lightroom you should get the window asking you if you want to back up. You can select where it saves it too on there.

If you don't see that box then go to Lightroom - Catalogue Settings - General and where it says Back Up choose 'every time Lightroom exits'. Then close Lightroom down and the back up box will appear allowing you to choose where it saves the back up to. If backing up every time is too often for you then go back into Lightroom - Cat settings etc and choose the frequency.
 
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Thanks so much @Gaz J !

I think I may have found the source of my problems - in finder, I clicked 'pictures' in the side bar and allllllll of my raw files from the last couple of years were in there! I'm not sure how, and I don't need them as I keep my raw files on an external drive. Anyone know where these might have saved from?
 
AWills said:
Thanks so much @Gaz J !

I think I may have found the source of my problems - in finder, I clicked 'pictures' in the side bar and allllllll of my raw files from the last couple of years were in there! I'm not sure how, and I don't need them as I keep my raw files on an external drive. Anyone know where these might have saved from?
Click to expand...

Lightroom has the ability to save a second copy of the import to another destination. Perhaps it has been set to copy to the pictures folder as a second copy. You can see if a second copy destination has been set on the top right hand side where you select the previews etc when carrying out an import sequence.
 
AWills said:
If I remove photos directly from Lightroom, does that remove them from the backup catalogs?
Click to expand...
The Lightroom catalogue does not contain the image files downloaded from your camera. It is a catalogue of the processing edits, etc, you make, not of the image files. Therefore you need to make a back-up of your images separately.
Lightroom does not hold your photos!
To answer the question, you will not remove photo image edits from the back-up if you delete them from your current catalogue. That is why it is called a back-up.
Hope that helps.
 
If you read the back up window LR tells you that it is not backing up your images.

You have two options when deleting files. Remove them from LR catalog, which removes the link to the image on the hard drive, or remove from disc which then sends the RAW file to the recycle bin.

Once you have LR set up then all your file management should be done in Lightroom so that it keeps track of where everything is. Going into your hard drive and moving stuff around isn't a good idea unless you want to give yourself a headache.

If you remove photos from LR it will only affect back ups from that point on.
 
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