Lightroom crashing a heck of a lot

[MKJphoto]

Hi guys, I hope someone out there can help me. I'm not a computer wizard and this is a tough environment for a dyslexic but I try to do the best I can but I'm having a huge problem at the moment. After heavy editing on LR5 occasionally the Mac Mini would crash. I moved up to LR6 the other day and editing a job this morning the mac crashed 4 times! I contacted Apple for advice, I knew most of my HD was used up with 'other' but never understood what this consisted of. The chap this morning helped me out and 'other' turns out to be 'documents'. This led to me finding this

There's a lot more below but I couldn't fit it all on the screen. I have no idea what it means but the fact that it's a mess hasn't escaped even my notice. I'm looking for someone to explain, in simple terms what's going on (imagine you're trying to explain this to your cat) and how I can remedy this problem. Any responses would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Mark.

[Mohit Goyal]

Hi MKJphoto,

These are the list of Lightroom catalog you have created in m Lightroom also, they are huge is size. You can move all these files to the external hard drive. Once you finish moving all these catalogs you can open all the catalog one by one and check which all catalog you want to keep and rest can be deleted.

Going forward you can create one catalog and use the same for a couple of projects also, you can name the catalog file according to the project so that it can be recognized by the file name.

Also, refer: How to create and manage catalogs in Photoshop Lightroom

Regards,

Mohit

[Rob_Cullen]

I think all these files {Lightroom 5 Catalog.LRCAT} are in fact your catalog Backups, since they appear steadily growing in size with advancing  dates.

The one catalog {Lightroom Catalog.lrcat  dated 9/12/2016}  looks recent, but why the name has changed (without the 5 ) I cannot explain (unless you re-named a catalog)

If you did 'update' a catalog by opening it when you 'moved' to Lightroom v6 then it would most likely be named like- {Lightroom 5 Catalog-2.LRCAT} with the  -2 suffix added to the old name.

If you search down further for a catalog with this name it may well be the most recent.

Commonly when Lr opens it does load the 'most recent' used catalog, so you could get a clue by opening Lr6 and checking the name of the catalog that you are viewing.  [ Ctrl+Alt+, ]  will open catalog settings and tell you exactly where the catalog exists on your hard-drive.

And as Mohit says, you will be able to delete all others after confirming the working catalog.. But take care to ask further advice if not sure.