5 Replies Latest reply: Dec 29, 2008 8:31 PM by hrh gracie RSS

    What affects catalog size?

    hrh gracie Community Member
      Running 2.2 on XP32.

      Every so often I'll run across a note exclaiming that V2 of LR creates very small catalogs - as in 40K RAW images having a catalog of 95MB.

      In my "large" catalog I've got about 36000 .dng images and my images.lrcat file is 1.03 GIGABYTES. How come there's such a drastic difference between mine and what others are claiming? What goes into this file that would affect size?
        • 1. Re: What affects catalog size?
          ssprengel Community Member
          Have you optimized your catalog, to reclaim deleted space?

          Develop history and keywords take up space, though I'm not sure how much compared to the main catalog entry per image.
          • 2. Re: What affects catalog size?
            hrh gracie Community Member
            Are you talking about the "Optimize and relaunch"? If so, I generally do that every couple weeks. Not often enough? How frequently should this be done?
            • 3. Re: What affects catalog size?
              ssprengel Community Member
              How often you optmize your catalog depends on your usage: how often things are deleted so space could be reclaimed. I would expect that normal usage doesn't waste any space as long as you're not moving images around or removing them, but perhaps LR keeps transient data in the database and that starts to expand it unnecessarily. I don't know.

              Next time you optimize/relaunch, check the size of the catalog before and again after and see how much space is reclaimed. Based on what you find, you can decide to do it more or less often. If the percentage reclaimed is small in relation to the total size, then you might be wasting time doing it at all.

              This doesn't really answer your question about why your catalog is proportionally larger than others, but perhaps you do perform more than the average number of edits, and have more than the average number of keywords per image.
              • 4. Re: What affects catalog size?
                J McWilliams Community Member
                Your .lrcat of just over a Gig sounds about right for 36,000 DNGs. It's the others I'd question!
                • 5. Re: What affects catalog size?
                  hrh gracie Community Member
                  OK, if that's in line with "normal" I won't worry about it..... I thought it was pretty amazing when I read that a catalog of 40K RAW images was only 98MB...