In this video I’ll answer a question I get all the time about recovering space on your hard drives from random (and very large) PSD or TIFF files that you create in Lightroom
Solved! How I Recovered Gigabytes of Space from Lightroom
Feb 1, 2019 | Lightroom, Tips, Tutorial, Videos | 30 comments
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Good video, and thanks… But – When I click on the “Metadata” filter, I get four columns: Date, Camera, Lens, Label. No matter what I try, I can’t seem to find a “File Type” filter. What’s up with that?
Never mind. I found the earlier comment that corresponds. Thanks for answering it earlier!
Hi Tommy – If you watch the video again you’ll see I click on one of them to change it to File Date. Thanks.
Good video, do appreciate them… good middle of the winter job.
Hey Matt, I’ll be soon purchasing a new MacBook Pro and will be running Lightroom. What system requirements would you suggest to run properly?
Hi Allen – Fastest processor you can get. At least 16GB of Ram and at least a 250GB internal SSD for all of your applications.
Hi Matt, ON1 is not able to look up a certain file type or any other criteria beginning in the pictures root directory. Only works folder by folder. Do you have an idea for a workaround?
thanks
Andreas
Hi Andreas. It’s not possible in ON1.
I keep nearly all of my photos in one large catalog (well over 100,000 photos) and accumulate backups on a set external hard drives. Note that my process doesn’t synchronize the backup with my working drive, it simply adds any new or changed files to the backup so the backup continues to grow. I have one full set on a 60 TB network attached RAID system and a second full set of external USB drives stored offsite. I also maintain a set of finished JPEGs on a cloud site.
I’ve developed a process to keep everything (including thumbnails) in the catalog but delete the RAW/PSD/TIFF/etc. from my internal 1 TB working drive.
I generally apply a star rating to everything I want to keep in some form.
Using the star rating filter for everything one star or greater.
Select All
Remove the filter (this keeps everything selected)
Select Edit / Invert Selection. This selects everything without any star rating
Drag the selection to a folder named “Seconds”
Go to the file system and delete the contents of the Seconds folder. I generally also empty the trash in the Recycle Bin.
Eventually I’ll delete photos with star ratings as well using the file system so that LR retains the record of the photo and the thumbnail but it doesn’t take space.
The result is that I still have a record and thumbnail of all deleted photos but they don’t take up space. If I need to mine something from the past I can find the exact file in the Seconds folder in Lightroom and then copy that file from a backup drive to my working drive.
It would be really nice if LR offered the option to delete the source file but retain the catalog entry, but alas it doesn’t.
“File Type” does not show up for me. My options are “Date,” “Camera,” “Lens,” and “Label.” ?????
Hi. If you watch the video at that point, you’ll see you can choose from a list if you click on one of those. Thanks.!
Thanks for this advice.
Have checked and found 254 PSD files out of total of 24800 files in my catalog.
If I were to delete these PSD files will I lose those images totally.?
Not sure I want to lose them.
I second Burt’s suggestion, especially if you have a lot of images. You can use the Painter tool to mark rejects, or you can turn on your Caps Lock key (auto advance), start at the first image, and then press U (unselected) or X (rejected). Every time you press a key you’ll move to the next image automatically. The advantage of this is that you can change your mind before you delete the rejected images.
Not related to this, but also a great space saver, is that if you tell it to, Lr will back up your catalogue daily, weekly, or whatever schedule you specify. NB: This doesn’t backup your images, it only creates a backup of your catalogue. HOWEVER, Lr never deletes those backups. If you’re on Windows (I’m sure there’s some equivalent for Macs) you can set it up so that your computer automatically deletes catalogue backups that are older than say, 2 months. I take no credit for this idea, and you take responsibility for your own machine, but you can read more here: https://www.wolfnowl.com/2010/05/deleting-old-lightroom-backups/
Mike.
P.S. I don’t use Lightroom’s backup strategy myself, but this plugin from the Photographer’s Toolbox: http://www.photographers-toolbox.com/products/mdawson/tpglrbackup/ It’s donationware. I set my backup folder to the Dropbox folder on my computer so that the catalogues get upload to Dropbox as well, and when the script (above) cleans out my Dropbox folder, it removes them from Dropbox as well.
Perhaps worth noting: one can add other factors like date to your filter. So for instance you can bring up all TIFF images taken between 2012 and 2017. Or whatever is convenient. Breaks the task down and makes it easier to devote more time and care to dealing with most recent images (or oldest, or from a particular trip) if those seem to need more care …
Another thing I’m trying is converting to DNG and then deleting the TIFF files. I don’t know if that will save any space, or much, but Lightroom makes it really easy so I’m letting the computer do the work. (Under “Library” there is a “Convert to DNG” item and you can add “delete original after conversion”.
I didn’t get the file types that has psds and jpegs. It just says All(1 file type) and Raw
Cheers Matt – that tutorial has spurred me to have a major clean-out, especially those huge Tiffs ex PS and other plug-ins.
I do enjoy watching the videos and have gotten some good hints.
I have my photos on an external drive, so that’s no problem. However, my laptop is down to just a few gigabytes of space. What’s taking up all the space? Backups of lightroom catalog. Can I erase old backups of lightroom catalog without doing harm to my photos? I appreciate any help you can give me on this. Thanks.
Remember that the catalog b/u backs up the database, not the images. I usually delete any b/u that is older than two weeks.
Doing the command-click for a bunch and then delete from that set is problematic. Very easy to mess up and lose the existing set after you have 100 in the set already, or to put one in there you really aren’t sure of, etc.
A better approach (at least to me) is to press X key for each of those images. That marks them as ‘reject.’ Then, after going through all the images, turn on the Attribute filter to show rejects. That lets you quickly scan and be sure there is nothing in there that you didn’t really want to delete.
You can then choose the menu “delete all rejected photos” or, since you have that set displayed, select all and delete.
BTW, in my case I have roughly 4000 PSD and 4000 TIFF images. Out of a catalog of 279K images, that is not enough for me to even bother going through. I am only using 25TB on my 72TB drive, so it will be awhile before I need to worry about cleaning up old images. 🙂
Great tip, Matt, thanks!
Thanks Matt, I did not think I had a lot of Tiffs but thought I would try the process to check it out. Imagine my surprise when I found 247 of them. Lots of duplicates, lots of old ones, lots of wasted space. I think I only saved about 30 of the images.
And then I played with some other metadata like camera and year and killed another 500. Hopefully the system will speed up some but in any case I now have a few more bytes to play with.
Enjoy the day
Barrie
Hey Matt,
As always, thanks for the tips. I have a slightly hybrid way of the pre-deletion selection process that
I would like to share.
Instead of simply cmd/ctrl-clicking the candidates, I created a “Ready to Trash” (aka “Death Row”) collection in LR, then made it the “target collection” (temporarily). I keep it as target only while I’m selecting for deletions, making sure to “un-target” it before other non-deletion selections. Then, I simply cruise through as you describe, but hit “B” instead to mark it into the “Ready” collection.
This, for me, has the benefit of begin able to quickly find out where I left off if the pre-delete process was interrupted. Oh yes, and how many times have we accidentally released the cmd/ctrl key when clicking, thus having to start all over again. By having a dedicated collection, not only is that annoying accident avoided (since each “B” hit acts on its own), but it enables me to go back before the final selection to re-check “death row” in case I made an error or change my mind before pulling the final “delete” trigger. I use the Death Row collection vs. the Quick Collection to avoid tying the Quick up if my pre-deletion (or other housekeeping) selection process gets interrupted. Works great for me, maybe others might find it helpful.
Good Idea. thanks
As always, great information. Now if you wouldn’t mind reminding me to do this annually! 😉
I always watch your videos and each and every time I gain a little gem of knowledge! Thank you.
Matt, I have been a fan a long time.
I believe that there is an easier way to select the ones you want to delete. Simply scroll though and press the X key to mark them as rejects. Then delete the rejects using “Delete Rejected Photos” under the Photo menu.
That way you don’t have to worry about accidentally clicking on a photo without the modifier key pressed.
Another way to save huge amounts of space is to take the photos you do want to save but will be unlikely to ever want to edit again, open them in Photoshop and flatten the image.
I had been saving the background and only merging the rest of the layers, leaving two layers in the file. That more than doubles the space. I just recovered 50GB in a few minutes doing that. Worse comes to worse I can always go grab the raw again and place it back into the file as the background.
Thanks for the reminder. I do that fairly often to clean up TIFFs that are dupes of jpgs that I have finished. But for me, I go to the top level of my folders panel, which has the same number as my catalog. I noticed yours is much different. How/why is that?
Hi Darryl – It’s because I have various folders in my catalog that don’t fall under the “Photos” folder.