Catalog Preview Quality and File Size?

[southwestform]

I use LR both on my Mac laptop and Mac desktops, though everything on my laptop is only there temporarily to view, prior to be transferring to the desktop. I want to delete everything from my laptop since everything has been transferred to the desktop.

Under Catalog Settings it indicates that my Preview Cache is 9GB, and my Standard Preview Size is set to Auto, Preview Quality is set to Medium.

1. How much of a difference does it make to increase the preview size and quality settings when editing photos in LR?

2. If I want to clear everything out of my Mac from LR that takes up space, is there anything else i should look for besides the .lrdata. and .lrcat files?

Thanks.

[Conrad C · Accepted solution]

southwestform  wrote

1. How much of a difference does it make to increase the preview size and quality settings when editing photos in LR?

I don't think it makes any difference when editing in the Develop module, because the Develop module view is continuously generated from the raw file plus the current adjustments.

southwestform  wrote

2. If I want to clear everything out of my Mac from LR that takes up space, is there anything else i should look for besides the .lrdata. and .lrcat files?

Also clear out the video cache, which can sometimes get very large if you've imported videos into Lightroom. On a Mac, the path is:

/Users/[your account name]/Library/Caches/Adobe/Lightroom/Video

[dj_paige]

southwestform  wrote

2. If I want to clear everything out of my Mac from LR that takes up space, is there anything else i should look for besides the .lrdata. and .lrcat files?

I'm not sure I understand what you want to do. You could move your photos to an external disk to save space. You could also move the catalog and previews to an external disk to save space. But none of those are the same as (a phrase which isn't really clear to me) "clear everything out of my Mac".

[southwestform]

I import photos and videos straight from the SD to my MacBook Pro to cull, make quick edits to send off, etc. I then move all these photos to the permanent location on my desktop Mac. Overtime, LR catalog files and other files get larger, since I do not need them on my MacBook Pro, I want to clear everything out.