Help clearing up my LR catalogue

[CircuitFactory]

Hi Guys,

I need some help. I am learning LR and making a real mess of it.

I keep my raw files on an external hard drive. I then have an LR catalogue on Dropbox. Whenever I want to do some work on the run, I take out my external hard drive. Open up LR catalogue from my drop box and away I go.

The problem I am facing is that my LR catalogue folder on dropbox is now a complete mess. Some are conflicted copies of catalogues. Others are just other catalogues I stupidly opened to import other photos into. I want to fix this mess.

I am looking to have one single LR catalogue that manages all my edits on my LR Classic CC.

Question: Which of the below files can I delete to leave me with my main catalogue?

Here is the catalogues on dropbox (disaster I know)

And here are how I keep my raw files on my external drive. Thanks in advance:

[kentdesign]

HI, Are you using Lightroom Mobile, Lightroom CC, or Lightroom Classic CC?

Just trying to understand better!

[dj_paige]

Don't put your catalog in Dropbox. This is not a good place for it. The conflicted copies may or may not be usable, this happens when you open a file on DropBox and it is open on another computer at the same time.

As far as which of these catalog you ought to be using, we don't know, we didn't create them. You can figure out which one(s) you still need by double-clicking on the .LRCAT files and then looking to see what the contents are and decide if you still need this catalog.

[CircuitFactory]

So can I delete all files except for the LR CAT file? (The catalogue itself?)

[kentdesign]

In your screen shot you show 2 LR.Cat files. Have you tested the one labeled -2 to be sure it has everything you need?

Also you should probably not delete the Previews and Smart Previews.lrdata files as those are already built and Lightroom would have to rebuild these.

And you have two other .lrcat files with conflicted copies along with their conflicted copies of the previews.

Click the twirl down arrow to see what those are before you delete anything!!!

[dj_paige]

CircuitFactory  wrote

So can I delete all files except for the LR CAT file? (The catalogue itself?)

Well I'm pretty sure I didn't say that. Have you figured out which LRCAT files you need to keep?

[Jao vdL]

Why don't you simply put the catalog along the raw files on your external? Dropbox is a recipe for headaches and you seem to always have that external anyway. I know people make it work but this business with conflicted copies is really pernicious and will remain until you get so regimented that you always close out of Lightroom on every machine and wait until dropbox has finished syncing up the catalog file and preview databases (which can be 10's to 100's of GB so can take a very long time to upload) before you move to another machine. Just putting it on the external avoids all that.