Lightroom help needed

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920
Name
Col
Edit My Images
Yes
Hi folks

I am a relative newbie to the wonders of lightroom having switched over from camera raw about a year ago and never really used it properly in terms of the catalogue side of things (only really used it for edits and exports up until now). I have recently reformatted my pc and as such reinstalled lightroom and want to set it up properly this time from the outset, however when i create my catalogue it seems to be coming out as an absolutely massive file size when the articles i have read seem to suggest it will be only a fraction of the size of the total image size. Currently my photos take up about 340gb of disk space, the lightroom catalogue didn't finish building itself and filled the remaining space on the hard disk which was approximately 80gb. Is this normal or am i doing something wrong? I switched off the location data (only photos that would have it were from my phone anyway), but i did have the smart previews box ticked. It just seems like an excessive file size for what is essentially a database.

I doubt it matters in the grand scheme of things but if it does and it helps then the photos and lightroom catalogue are both on a storage disk that is separate from my c:. PC spec is basically intel xeon e3 1241 (equivalent to i7 4770 haswell edition), 8gb ram, mechanical 7200rpm hard disk(s) and windows 10 pro.

Cheers

Col
 
Are you importing the photos?

When you set Lightroom up, you can point it to the location of your images and "Add" them. This just tells LR that the images are "here".

If you "Copy" images, LR will start building a duplicate at the new location. This could be one issue.

Also, my Image folder is 367Gb. My Lightroom catalogue (the lrcat file) is 122Mb and my previews (mini jpegs of all my photos) is 9Gb. If you go to Edit>Catalog Settings you can see how big your Previews file is. This could be the cause as well. My previews are "Medium" sized and expire after 30 days. I've not worked with Smart previews and have that function turned off (0 bytes). This might be a good place to start checking.

Edit to add a link to a nice article on Smart previews: https://www.creative-photographer.com/smart-previews-lightroom/ If you're not working on your images with a disconnected HDD then I'm not sure they're worth having.
 
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that sounds like where i am going wrong then, i was doing it as an import rather than an add. I will give that a go tonight i think and see how it goes since what you are saying about your library is roughly where i was expecting mine to be. Thanks for the help, i will report back once i have tried it! Storage disk is an internal one that is never disconnected.
 
Another benefit is that an "Add" is much much quicker than an Import.

Good luck!
 
FWIW

I use LR6 and to be specific (sorry if I state the obvious) adding anything to the catalogue use the "Import" function with the type of import selection as 'add'.

Of late I have set it to import 1:1 previews and to keep them with no time limit.....................slow PC means when I open(ed) a file in LR that needs to rebuild the 1:1 view its takes too long and as I have disk space I kept to never remove. This had made my Preview folder 114GB in size.

The Catalogue is 734MB and I have >850GB and growing of image files. (NB I am planning to cull as much as I can that is no longer worth holding on to)

PS my PC is a multi hard drive system ~ the OS and programs drive(s) is 500GB and the photo drives are 2TB and 1.5TB (this latter one is is a partition of another 2TB drive)
 
As regards "Smart Previews" I had the same question.

In essence, if you import your images and save them to, say, an external USB drive, a small preview is created for viewing the image when the USB device is not there. Once you reconnect the USB drive the Previews are 'proper' ones again, not the miniscule, low quality SmartPreview version.
 
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