Lightroom Galleries with External Drives

Hi RC:
Nice way to save space in your computer’s hard drive. Nice tutorial. What about the “Backups” folder in: My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom? How can you reduce the size of this Backups folder? Mine is 14GB (~50% of the Lighroom folder) and contain many subfolders with different dates. Can I delete the old ones without affecting my Lightroom Backup system?

Hi, what do I do if I have been saving file catalogs not on my external hard drive, but on hard disk? How do I move them without loosing any information? Thank you

[...] Lightroom Galleries with External Drives – by RC! [...]

Ricardo:
ABSOLUTELY – I never keep more than 5 days of information of backups and I’ve changed my settings to backup once a week instead of once a day. This helps a lot. But yes.. if I know that my database has worked for a specific amount of time.. DELETE everything else. I once didnt do that and after deleting the backups I didnt need got back 40GB of space!

Anya:
For me, I would totally save the catalog file on the disk instead of an external file. Think of it this way: You really don’t permanently add anything to the file until you export or open in Photoshop.. all of the other times they are changes in metadata, and all of those changes are in those catalogs (lrcat and the data file). I’d thik that having that be accessed repeatedly over an external drive wouldnt be good.. and would mean that you couldnt use Lightroom at all without the drive plugged in.

Keep the catalog file on the hard drive, delete extraneous backups, and move your images to an external drive.. and you should be all set.

Hope those help!
RC

RC, Is all this to say that the actual image info. is on the external drive and are only referenced in Lightroom as a catalog file? I have not bought Lightroom yet. Still using Bridge and PSd CS3. Considering the move. Thanks, Sandy Olson

Ricardo, Another approach to reducing catalog backup space is to compress them. They zip pretty well – to about 10% of their original size (i.e. 90% space saving). I’ve created a plugin ( http://thephotogeek.com/lightroom/config-backup/ ) that will do this for you without leaving Lightroom, and can also backup your presets and other configuration files at the same time.

[...] Lightroom Galleries with External Drives – by RC! [...]

Thanks for the info. Now I know where all those question marks are coming from. Good explanation.

Hi, I’ve always saved to my hard disk, now want to move to external, how do I move images (whilst keeping lrcat and data file on hard disk) and maintain the image links? export catalogue? – don’t want to individually re-link 4,000 pics!. Good tutorial – if only I’d seen it earlier! cheers

Nice tutorial RC
but what if you have a dozen filled externals you need
2 images for a job and they are on different drives