Copies of all Originals on my hard drive although it's unchecked

[Roman Holtwick]

Hello early adopter friends, hey Adobe.

I switched to the new Lightroom CC and in genereal I am more than pleased with it. There's just one thing (and a few little which I am sure will be fixed in the near future):

I synced all my unprocessed images with the cloud at this point. One of the big advantages of the cloud is, besides from having the images available everywhere, to save disk space. For me this is constantly about 200GB.

Now I realized my disk space isn't actually becoming free. I looked on my hard drive and found, that LR actually made copies of every imported photoin it's own folder. I checked the option menu: The photo-cache is on "C", the "download originals to"-option is unchecked, nevertheless theres a copy of the whole cloud storage on my second hard drive "D".

Has anyone experienced this problem? How did you solve it?

Also: What happens if I just delete the folder on my hard drive? This shouldn't affect the cloud in any way, right?

Thanks in advance for any qualified answers!

[Jim Wilde]

What did you switch from? And how did you get all the images into LRCC in the first place? If you migrated a catalog from Lightroom Classic or earlier version where did you keep those original images? On the D drive? Migrating an existing set of images into LRCC does not remove those original images when the migration is complete, it instead creates a full copy of them on whatever drive you may have specified in the LRCC preferences (or the default system drive if you didn't change it). That copy of the images is what is then used to upload to the cloud, after which they should gradually (not immediately) be removed in accordance with your LRCC preferences...but the original set of images is not touched.

So either the images on the D drive are the originals which were input to the initial migration to LRCC, or they are originals which you added to LRCC which are initially copied to hard drive pending upload and subsequent removal. The point is that if images already exist on a hard drive, and are then added to LRCC (either my migration or the "Add Photos" option), those originals remain where they are as LRCC creates it's own copy of them for subsequent upload and local management.

[Roman Holtwick]

Ah, this clarifies it a little, thanks!

Well: I did not migrate any catalogue because I wanted to start fresh. So I imported files from the D drive as well as new images directly from the SD-Card. All of them are in the LR-folder. I thought this is what the cache is for, which should be located on C. But this just seems to be for the Smart previews. SO the files should be gradually deleted and it caches them in the folder it would also store the "copies of originals" in, if the option was checked? So it would basically do the same, just not delete them until they are deleted from the cloud. Right?

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

Just to be clear....

The images you add from memory card are copied to the default location, or if specified to a location of your choosing. These originals will be managed by LRCC in accordance with your preference setting....so if you have unchecked the option to "Store Originals Locally" they should over time be removed. The speed with which they are removed might be determined by things such as available free space on the drive, frequency of access, etc.

Pre-existing images on a hard drive which you import to LRCC will be copied to the default/specified location, uploaded from there, and then "managed" in the same way as above. But the pre-existing images are NOT managed by LRCC, they will stay where they are unless/until you manually remove them.

That all make sense?

[Roman Holtwick]

Yes, the part with the pre-existing images was clear to me. Got the rest now too. Of course the images are stored somewhere before they are uploaded, but the speed in which they are removed is somewhat slow then.

I tried removing an image from there, nothing happened, it's still available from everywhere. It has currently stored 50GB of 70GB I have in the cloud yet, which I think should be less. I'll keep watching, for now I specified a folder where it makes sense and... Let's see...

Thanks for your help!