Did you know that Lightroom might be eating up your computer’s hard drive space, without your knowledge? I didn’t. I kept wondering why my computer hard drive was always full. Eventually I stumbled onto Lightroom being the culprit.
Lightroom works by uploading the photos that you import to your Adobe cloud storage, and these originals in the cloud are then used as the basis for all edits. This contrasts with Lightroom Classic, which links to files on your computer’s local storage.
Now, your Lightroom catalog can be synced with a Lightroom Classic catalog, which (as I will explain in a future article) results in all your cloud photos being downloaded (again) to your computer, even if you have local copies stored there already. You can also tell Lightroom to store certain albums locally.
However, this is not the hard drive-eating behavior that I’m talking about here: Rather, it’s a back-end caching feature of Lightroom that makes it quicker to work on your files. When you import photos to Lightroom, the software copies them to another folder on your computer’s local drive before uploading them to the cloud. And then these cached images stay there, taking up your hard drive storage without so much as saying hello.
Set up your Lightroom cache so it doesn’t take over your drive
You can’t manually force clearing this cache of images from within Lightroom. Lightroom uses algorithms to decide which photos are “active” and which are not, and will clear the cached images when it decides they are no longer needed. Delving into Lightroom’s preferences, you’ll find this tab under Local Storage.
These options allow you to adjust the cache size, but doing so will not remove previously cached images. In other words, if your cache is already way over the percentage you specify here, it’ll stay that way.
Fortunately, you can salvage the situation. The cached files live in a folder on a file path like this (or hit Browse when in the Local Storage tab shown above to open the offending folder):
- PC: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Adobe\Lightroom CC\Data\LONG STRING OF RANDOM CHARACTERS\originals
- Mac: /Users/Name/Pictures/Lightroom Library.Library/LONG STRING OF RANDOM CHARACTERS/originals
Once the images have been uploaded to the cloud, they can be deleted from the cache folder manually, to free up hard drive storage. Presuming, of course, that you do have the originals stored elsewhere on your computer (and backed up too)!
Clear space in your Lightroom cloud storage
Are you running out of space in your Adobe cloud storage? Watch out for my next article where I’ll show you how you can migrate your Lightroom catalog into Lightroom Classic, and clear out cloud space without losing your photos or edits.
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I recently deleted (by mistake) the cached LRc photos and then whenever I went into view them I got the error message ‘file not found’ or something like that. The smart previews seem to remain however I could not fathom out how to sync the full res images again?
Hi Martin! Did you delete cached Lightroom or Lightroom Classic files? Can you tell me the path you deleted them from (the folder)?
This article is very helpful. My situation is I have several photos on a MacBook. I want my desktop iMac to be main computer with which I interface to Lightroom. I think I have sent some of the photos from the MacBook to the cloud. Others are just on the hard drive of the MacBook. How do I make sure that the photos which are already in the cloud are cached on the iMac? How do I get the photos which reside on the MacBook hard drive to the cloud while being cached on the iMac? Also, I have a… Read more »
Hi Vern, glad you found it helpful. To get the photos from the cloud to your iMac external hard drive, you need to use a Lightroom Classic catalog and set it to sync with your Lightroom catalog. On your iMac, open Lightroom Classic and click the cloud icon top right, then the settings gear. The “Account” section on the Lightroom Sync tab is where you can link it to your Lightroom catalog. Then you should see a section that says “Location.” You can set a folder there, and you would set it to the external hard drive attached to your… Read more »
Hi! I have this issue and don’t quite know what to do. I have to these giant cache files and don’t know if I can just delete them? I run Classic and CC, but am shifting towards just Classic.