The 'Everything Adobe Lightroom' Thread

don't know if its me, but finding Lightroom a total HDD hog now, 700 GB HDD / 2TB HDD backup my 700GB is full now, having to delete things to accomodate it lol.
 
13GB?! Mines 1.22GB with 118k photos...

My LR4.4 install folder is 877MB, Cache folder is currently at ~8GB, Previews folder at ~16GB. If you are backing up regularly then don't forget you'll have multiple copies of the database.
 
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ill have to look in to this my cata atm is 60GB no idea how to check to see what one its running on.

At one point i had all my cata on my external HDD then became sloppy and had photos stored on my C: again.
 
Sorry I think I was ta talking cross purpose.

The catalogue FILE (.lrcat) itself is small for me - around 400MB with 35K photos indexed.

I was talking about the entire catalogue directory contents, of which case I believe most of the catalogue size is made up of the 1:1 preview cache so will vary with day by day usage.

MP4 - if you are also talking about the catalogue directory size, have a look under:-

Edit | Catalogue settings | File Handling

And make sure "Automatically Discard 1:1 Previews" is not set to never! :)
 
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So, those of you that upgraded from 3 to 4, or 4 to 5 did you leave your old images as edited by your older version of LR or allow the new process on your old images.

I'm a little un-sure what to do :)
 
From 3 to 4 I left Lightroom update all images with the new v4 processing engine when prompted. From 4 to 5 the engine remains unchanged, nothing needed to be done other than a catalogue upgrade at the start (prompted).
 
From 4 to 5? Nope, all my processing in v4 was done via custom presets. The development sliders haven't changed from 4 to 5 so I wouldn't expect things to change here.

From 3 to 4 or 3 to 5 you will see them change due to engine changes. All photos will need to be updated, there will be an icon by the thumb to update the process settings from what I recall.
 
That's one of the nice things about Lightroom; that it allows your old image processing to coexist with the newer processing versions in your catalogue. You even have the old sliders so you can continue editing an image as it was, without updating it. Or make a virtual copy of the image in the catalogue and update only the copy to the new process version, and have a play like that.

From what I remember of the change between 3 and 4, what stood out was a slight increase in shadow detail (and hence a slight reduction in contrast). I've only updated individual images, or batches, as and when I've been back to do more work on them. I can't think of an instance when I didn't prefer the newer process version after a little tweaking, but even so I haven't done a global update to the catalogue...

Haven't updated to 5 yet as I'm waiting for the beta to properly finish! :p There's a release candidate for 5.2 floating around now that they'd like people to test, which is supposed to fix some of the critical bugs.
 
Right finally installed my LR5 upgrade.

Question, I noticed in my LR3 folder prior to upgrade it looks like this....



ON the left you have the back ups folder, in there are loads of LRcat files, which I usually then copy and paste to a back up HDD as well. I presume these hold the metadata for all your alterations and the order/folder lay out??

Then on the right there is another LRcat file which gets updated every time I close LR. What is different in that LRcat file that isn't in the back up folder?

Anyway before I upgraded I Backed the lot up just in case :)

What do you do leave it a couple of months then delete down the old LRcat files and those in the back up folder?
 
I just backup the entire folder! My RAW files are imported from card to HDD and the catalogue itself is working off the SSD (OS drive) so when it backs up and optimises it's doing it to hdd which in turn gets backed up to another hdd during the usual backup run.

Think the LRdata folder contains everything yeah as long as that structure is maintained.
 
Thanks mrk, lastly sis you do this step...

http://thelightroomlab.com/2013/06/how-to-upgrade-to-adobe-photoshop-lightroom-5/

Step 5:

Step 5: Set Your Lightroom 5 Default Catalog Preference

Once you have successfully upgraded your old Catalog you should immediately visit your Preferences Menus. The upgrade process is not complete until you set a the right default in your Lightroom 5 Preferences. Failure to complete this step often creates confusion. Users who skip this phase of the process are often asked to upgrade their old Lightroom Catalogs again and again. Often those who skip this critical step eventual create a complete mess of needless extra .lrcat files.

To prevent confusion, please visit the Preferences > General Tab and tell the program to load your new upgraded Lightroom 5 Catalog as the default.

Do me a favour if you can please, can you go to the preferences in that step and see what yours is set to. Without doing that step mine is set to 'latest catalogue' :)

IN the drop downs is Lightroom 5 though :)
 
If you use the backup feature when exiting just the lrcat is exported and optimised. At least that's what mine is doing anyway! The preview data isn't backed up I notice but I double backup LR anyway using a sync run in FreeFileSync.

Here's how my structure looks:

C drive where the working catalog and preview data is stored and used, the settings folder is about 2MB, the previews folder is about 5GB. I selectively enable oreviews/1:1 depending on what I'm working on so this folder isn't huge.
LR_Cdrive.jpg

Here is where my RAW files are imported by LR which is on my documents HDD.
LR_Raws.jpg

And here is my Lightroom backup directory on the same drive which is then synced to the backup drive when connected. The auto folder is where Lightroom backs up the catalogue and data during exit. The other folder is the manual one I sync using 3rd party software. this includes everything so a 1:1 of the C drive folder from above. The C drive dir also contains custom presets and so on.
LR_BackupDir.jpg
 
I upgraded to LR5 at the weekend, and looking at my file structure I appear to have a good deal of legacy idly sitting around.

I've had every edition of Lightroom since the beginning, and have over 10 gb of backups and redundant catalogs. My settings are to use the most recent catalog. It seems I need to do some cleaning... mrk - my previews folder for LR5 is 5 gb also.

I'm enjoying LR5 so far though. Amazing noise reduction and very snappy response.
 
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