Lightroom Classic Catalog Size

[Ezekiel Tulagan]

MyLightroom catalogue is really, really big. It takes more than half of my SSD hard disk of my iMac. It's 500gb. I already tried moving the whole catalogue to an external hard disk, but when i open Lightroom my latest pictures are all gone.

The actual catalog file ends with .lrcat (That is .(DOT)LRCAT). I suspect the actual catalog file is not 500 GigaBytes but the whole folder where the LR catalog is stored could be that size. So look in the main, parent, folder your catalog is in and you should also find a folder called LightroomCatalogName Previews.lrdata. That is were LR stores the PREVIEW of the images you have imported. That complete folder, with many many Subfolder, can take up a lot of hard drive space. With LR CLOSED you can safely DELETE that Previews folder to free up disk space and the next time you start LR it will be recreated and Empty until you browse through your image files. Then LR will recreate standard preview for the image files you have displayed on screen.

You can set how ofter to discard the 1:1 previews in Catalog Settings. As you are probably not always looking at older photos at 1:1 on a regular basis this can save HD space. I have mine set for 30 days and it is working fine.

From what I gather, the CC Photo plan has a 2GB cap - would that prevent my catalog from syncing? Or is there separate storage for these files, and would I be ok with just the catalog and previews syncing if I keep my main raw files on my desktop machine?

If I can really keep a searchable and synchronized copy of my Lightroom Catalog on my laptop, then that's great. And I understand that a preliminary sync would definitely take a while, but if it was able to quickly sync in new files afterwards as added, then that would be great, and totally make the CC membership worthwhile.

But if the whole thing's just not going to work with this many images (I know that storage and bandwidth are still somewhat limiting factors), then maybe it makes more sense to get the standalone upgrade.

I'm actually less interested in the mobile version, and really just liking the idea of my laptop having a synced up version of my whole catalog. (Right now, I can do this by exporting a copy of the catalog once in a while, but that's annoying, and actual sync would be nice.)

Basically, the appeal is for the situations where I might want to pull things up on the fly, in a less structured way, for impromptu slideshows, or examples during a workshop, etc - and having newest work available automatically.

I think the problem isn't going to be the catalogue itself, the lrcat file. I often work on a catalogue that's got just over 600k pictures and as Paige says, backup is the only thing that's slower. I can't recall the catalogue's file size, but it's not huge and I'd expect it to sync as fast as bandwidth allows. Not sure if it would exceed the 2Gb CC space, maybe, but remember that the catalogue also has a previews folder and could very easily exceed the limit.

However, the blurb you quoted isn't really about syncing the catalogue via the CC folder - it's talking about Lr Mobile. Notice how it doesn't mention other installations of Lightroom. So with Mobile you have your catalogue on one computer and connecting it to Lightroom Mobile. This sends compressed versions of your pictures to Adobe's cloud, which then lets you edit images on mobile devices (quite a lot of adjustments plus star ratings and flags) and use a web browser on another real computer (to edit star ratings and flags).

I work on a rough assumption that each smart preview (the compressed file that gets uploaded) is about 1 megabyte, but there isn't a limit to how many of these smart previews can be uploaded and they don't count against the 2Gb Photography Plan or 20Gb full CC storage. So it could mean the entire archive. I've not pushed it beyond 10000, but that's down to my needs and also the difficulty of finding pictures ( eg by keyword) on a mobile device.

Your catalog will be "on" one computer, either a PC or Mac that runs regular Windows or OSX. Collections you specifically designate for synchronization with LR Mobile can be accessed via a simplified user-interface on iOS and Android tablets and smartphones, or via a browser from the website lightroom.adobe.com if you're on a regular computer, that shows you your pictures when you login as you. That's it. There are no hierarchies or folder structure like in LR, just groups of photos in collections that you have to scroll through to find a specific photo, so the fewer the better.

If synchronize all your photos, then there must be enough storage on your phone or tablet to hold all the reduced-sized smart previews that are being used as proxies for the master photos on the desktop/laptop device. So far you cannot designate where photos are stored on the LR Mobile devices, so it'll fill up the main memory of the device, and unless you have one that has only one area of memory, like iPhones and some newer Android devices, rather than memory and a removable flash card, then you won't be able to get very many images on it. You will also want to be careful not to be syncing unless you are on Wi-Fi or have an unlimited data plan.

I don't use LR Mobile, much, but do use LR on two computers, most every day, using a USB3 external drive that I swap between the two computers, and back up to another USB3 drive overnight or at other important times. It's relatively easy to lose or damage a portable drive so you always want it backed up elsewhere.

i just updated to classic. when the application opens up, whatever folder of photos it is looking at disappears when i go into develop module. They also disappear when i click onto another folder of photos. and then, i can never come back to anything. grey screen where the photo should be displayed with " loading" written. i have to quit lightroom which turns into a force quit. macOS 10.12.6 with nothing wrong with my setup, hardware or software.

adobe support uninstalled and reinstalled the program via screen share. no change. renamed system files, no change. after an hour of troubleshooting they told me that classic has a file limit of 50000 photos and i must breakup my catalogue file which to me sounds ridiculous. i was forced to reinstall my lightroom standalone which works fine.

I'm not sure the file limit of 50k photos makes a difference. I have just under 20k photos in my internal hard drive and another 47k on an external hard drive and, to my knowledge, they are all part of the same catalogue. Mines does seem to work fine with the Classic (recent) version of LR on creative cloud.

this is gross. obviously there is an issue with the application and they are not helping me. splitting up a catalogue is missions who wants to spend time doing that, im shocked that this was their solution, especially since the older stand alone version has no problems.

for as much as we have to spend to have this subscription, giving me zero support on weekends sucks too, and when you do they still dont solve the problem. i also would appreciate getting someone at the very least in the same continent.

Looks like the below info is wrong. With the latest Creative Crowd update from 2017, it looks like all my catalogs since 2003 are now suddenly way over Adobe's new size limit. Every catalog I open now give tells me I have to use a 3rd party app for catalogs over 4GB.

Any suggestions? Given how poor Adobe's technical support has been, I can't believe they are recommending a 3rd party app to make their software work. And I can't imagine they will provide technical support for the 3rd party bandaid they are recommending to use.

However, the message is real. When LR creates a ZIP file of the catalog file and the catalog file is more than 4 GB in size, the built-in mac utility to unzip the file will not work due to the file being bigger than 4 GB. In that case, you will need to use a 3rd party app that correctly handles ZIP files that big.

I get the same message. I don't understand what it means. Is it only a backup issue rather than an operating issue with LR, meaning that on an every-day basis, LR will work fine with the catalog, able to access all files, but if you need it at some point as a backup (LR fails, for example), you need the 3rd party app?

My Lightroom Catalog.lrcat is less than 1 GB, but my Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrcat and Light Catalog Smart Previews.lrcat are both over 4 GB. Does the message pertain to the main Catalog or the Catalog plus all the previews?

For backup purposes, only the LrCat file is counted. The folder trees that contain your previews (*.LrData) do not get backed up because they can be recreated at any time and their contents tend to be temporary.

I've seen commentary by people who appear to be expert Lightroom users, giving contradictory information about large catalogs in Lightroom Classic. Some say 100,000 images in a catgalog is totally fine, and others say that Lightroom starts slowing down when you hit 10,000.

I have LR 6.14 on a desktop PC with about 46,000 images in the catalog. The PC is running Windows 10 and has 24 GB of ram and a quad core CPU. The catalog is on an internal SSD drive. It sometimes get pathologically slow, for example taking 10 seconds to click on an image when selecting it in the Grid view. Sometimes it seems to just go out to lunch for minutes with the program winking out and reappearing, unresponsive until it settles down.

Windows updates is the wrong way to insure hardware is up to date. Windows used to try and do that, but now days that does not occur. You would need to get the driver from AMD. And your AMD supporting app is also old.

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