Yours truly managed to snag press credentials once again this year, so of course, I went down to Laguna Seca to get some practice in before the main event! This year, Monterey Car Week will be celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the International Motor Sports Association. This means nearly all of the famous GTP, Group C, and even LMP race cars will be present at the track!
The Monterey Pre-Reunion was chock full of awesome race cars from the past, including the legendary Audi R8 Le Mans Race Car that dominated The American Le Mans Series from 2000 to 2004! Also, there were more than a few fire-breathing Group C and GTP race cars, including the Toyota-Eagle GTP Race Car!
The best part of all this? I get to see these cars again starting Thursday! I’ll be staying at the track with some friends, so it’s going to be racing from sunrise to sundown!
The Monterey Pre-Reunion is a sort of practice session that kicks off the start of the week. Racecar owners and their teams could get laps in and dial in their cars for the fastest lap times. It’s a great opportunity to get really close to the action since it’s not as crowded as the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion. In fact, it’s very similar to the Spring Classic series at Laguna Seca.
Of course, I’ve been getting ready for Monterey Car Week by tidying up my Lightroom Library! Plus, I got my Media Credentials in the mail! I’ll be shooting behind the fences once again!
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
Why keep all these rejected photos when you can just delete them?
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 It didn’t make sense to keep unpublished photos 2-3 years after the fact.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.
Nearly a Terabyte freed. I wonder how much more I can free up?
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.
