So…the answer would be that once you’ve upgraded to Lightroom 5 and you’re happy with everything, yes, you could go ahead and delete the older catalogs. Unless you plan on reverting back to Lightroom 4, you’ll never use it.
Should I delete old lightroom backups?
It is completely safe to delete old backups (just keep the last 2-3) to save space on your storage device. Can I delete my Lightroom Catalog and start over? You can delete a Lightroom catalog. A Lightroom catalog stores meta-data about the images, previews, and edits you’ve made. But, it does not include your original images.
Deleting Lightroom catalog backups is a different story. Apart from saving your catalog, Lightroom also offers to save a backup copy of your catalog to a (preferably) different location than your computer for redundancy. Over time, you might end up with multiple copies of your catalog, and many of them might be outdated too.
Then, is it safe to delete old Lightroom previews?
I was recently cleaning out the storage on my computer, and realized that Lightroom’s files were taking up a pretty large chunk of space — about 20GB. After digging around a bit, I found that old previews and backups were responsible for a large chunk of that space, and could be safely deleted.
Which Lightroom files can I delete?
Thankfully, this article will tell you everything you need to know to clean up you Lightroom and answer the burning question once and for all which is: “Which Lightroom files can I delete?” As a general rule, Lightroom files which may be deleted include catalogs, catalog backups, temporary import data, previews and smart previews.
Another common query is “How do I backup my Lightroom files?”.
Within the Lightroom catalog folder, you should see a folder named “Backups”. If your situation is anything like mine was, it’ll have backups all of the way back to when you first installed Lightroom. Delete the ones which you don’t need anymore.
What is the catalog in Lightroom?
The catalog also contains previews, which, in the simplest terms is Lightroom’s copy of your images. Since Lightroom works non-destructively, it makes a copy of your images (previews) and then stores them in the catalog. Is it safe to delete Lightroom catalogs?
What to do if Lightroom Classic doesn’t open?
However, if Lightroom crashed or the computer crashed, those files can be left behind, which can get in the way of opening the catalog again. If that ever happens to you, you can simply delete the . lock file and Lightroom Classic should open normally.