Home › Forums › Photography Q&A › Lightroom Workflow and Space Saving
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Warrior Princess.
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July 4, 2023 at 1:30 pm #80231
Warrior Princess
ParticipantHello friends!
Any tips for me on how to save space and when to delete RAW images when the JPEGs are exported, so I don’t completely use up my disk space and save too many RAW photos that I won’t go back and edit again? Thank you. I am a bit overwhelmed with all the photos all over the place
(RAW and JPEG)God bless,
Brieanna
July 4, 2023 at 3:19 pm #80232Blessings Captured
ParticipantFirst of all I would suggest getting all your pictures together and organized into one place. The system that my mom taught me is having folders by date. Year-Month-Date. For the “Date” folder I’ll do whatever days that I upload them and write a description. Such as “7-1 to 7-4, flowers, fireworks, sunset”. That keeps the folders in order as well as it makes searching for a picture easy. I can search by date or by keyword. (It even works if you don’t use lightroom, such as other family members).
As for deleting; I don’t normally delete my good RAWs (I’ll delete the poor quality images). A lot of times I’ll put the exported JPEGs into a folder by usage (Stock, Lenspiration, Email, etc.) then I’ll delate them when I’m done. That keeps things tidy and avoids unnecessary duplicates.
Thirdly, I would suggest getting a external hard drive or two. It will keep you disk free and provide a backup. I’ve been using WD 2TB Elements hard drives for the past nine months and haven’t had any trouble with them. I would recommend getting them from Adorama.
The backup system that I use is to store the current year’s picture on my laptop and then every couple weeks back them up to a hard drive. Every month or two I make a second backup to another hard drive. Spending the $70 for a second hard drive is cheaper then trying to recover a crashed drive for $300-$500.
Lastly, once you get all your pictures organized, I would recommend using Syncback free to back up your pictures. It’s fast, safe and recognizes any edits or duplicates.
That’s my storage and backup workflow, maybe you’ll be able to use a couple tips.
-Hannah
July 5, 2023 at 8:02 pm #80238Warrior Princess
Participant@blessingscaptured Oh my, thank you so much! I appreciate all of your wisdom. 🙂
July 5, 2023 at 8:06 pm #80239Warrior Princess
ParticipantAlso, why do I have an xmp file next to every RAW? Is there a way to merge them so I don’t see any blank xmp’s in my folder?
July 6, 2023 at 9:03 am #80249Blessings Captured
ParticipantI’m thankful it was a blessing for you.
The xmp files are where Lightroom stores all the edits of your pictures. They are very small files and it’s a way to make your edits available across multiple LR catalogs, computers and editing programs.
When I view my pictures with Window’s “Photos” it skips over the xmps so it’s not a problem in that way.July 6, 2023 at 4:31 pm #80290Warrior Princess
ParticipantOh, I see. Then I guess I just need to learn to ignore them 🙂
July 7, 2023 at 10:37 am #80321Lydia Bennett
KeymasterThe xmp files don’t bother me because I’m basically never viewing the photos in the computer folders, I do ALL my organizing, viewing, editing, etc in Lightroom. As far as organizing photos, I follow the workflow laid out in the lesson, Secrets to Organizing Photos, in the Foundations Course. That has worked great for me. Besides things mentioned in that lesson, another way to save space is to delete photos. 🙂 Personally I don’t actually delete a TON of photos, but if they’re remarkably bad I’ll reject flag them in Lightroom and then every so often I delete all the reject-flagged photos.
July 10, 2023 at 6:35 pm #80403Warrior Princess
Participant@lenspirationlydia Thank you! I was wondering if you have an upgraded cloud space, because I try to upload a lot of my photos into Lightroom, but it holds only about 700 photos, and then it says I need to free up disk space. What do I do about that? Is it possible to delete photos on Lightroom, but keep them in the original folders on the computer?
July 11, 2023 at 11:16 am #80414Lydia Bennett
Keymaster@warrior-princess, good question. Before I give an answer, let me ask: do you use Lightroom, or Lightroom Classic?
July 11, 2023 at 4:42 pm #80422Warrior Princess
Participant@lenspirationlydia I use Lightroom (not Classic)
July 12, 2023 at 9:56 am #80423Lydia Bennett
Keymaster@warrior-princess, good to know! I actually use Lightroom Classic, so my photos are all stored on my hard drive and Lightroom itself is not storing any photos. So when I run out of space on my hard drive (as I did recently), I just purchase an external hard drive to store older photos on and can still access those in Lightroom whenever that drive is connected to my computer.
If you’re using Lightroom (not classic), this article has a note at the bottom on “What happens to my photos if I exceed my allotment of cloud storage?” so that might be helpful to read.
July 12, 2023 at 12:14 pm #80425Warrior Princess
ParticipantThank you! I think I get it now 😉
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