Monterey Car Week is only a few days away!
I realized this as I returned from my week hiatus. So, naturally, I decided to start preparing my camera equipment and set about reviewing my Lightroom settings. It’s then that realized that my main Hard Drive was slowly running out of space. I have a massive 3 Terabyte Hard Drive I added when I first built my computer as a gaming rig in 2014. Now, only 500 Gigabytes were left. Because I shoot in RAW, I needed to find a way to free up space in my hard drive before the weekend! That’s when I had the idea of cleaning the Lightroom Library to see how much space my junked photos were taking up!
Boy, am I glad I did!
You don’t have to keep everything
When I first started cleaning my Lightroom library, I was apprehensive about getting rid of some photos. After all, I’ve got some great photos over the years and I can’t always publish all of them. But, the truth is that I haven’t revisited most of those photos AFTER I already published my favorites. It didn’t make sense to keep unpublished photos 2-3 years after the fact. Plus, the majority of those photos I skipped over because they were either a duplicate or they were throaways. So, I decided to take some of the Konmari method and start deleting old, unused, and rejected photos.
I’m not even halfway through the process of deleting the old photos, and I’ve noticed exactly how much space these unused and unpublished photos were taking up: When I started, I had about 500GB left on my 3TB Hard Drive. Now, I’ve got about 850GB free! I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up clearing out another 500GB.
Lesson Learned
Clean your Lightroom Library! You have no idea how much space is wasted when you keep rejected or unmarked photos. If you’re not going to use it, it’s better off in the Recycle Bin.
Just don’t forget to clear that out too.