Here’s what I did – some for speed, others just freeing up space.

0. Complete a Time Machine backup first.

Naturally, I wanted to make sure a had a backup before I did anything destructive – such as deleting files – so I forced Apple’s Time Machine to complete a backup. With that out of the way, I could start tidying up. If you’re on Windows, you should do a backup first before you do anything else.

1. Check the Backups directory.

I have Lr setup to backup my catalogue weekly – this keeps a fairly good trail of backups in case something goes wrong. It hasn’t yet. However, after 2 years of Lightroom use, my directory of Lightroom catalogue backups had blown out to 13.52GB! There were a couple of things I did to trash some of the existing backups.

• I removed all Lr v1 backups. I knew the date that I upgraded (by the last modified date of my old v1 catalogue file). I deleted all the v1 backups and this freed up 8.71GB. Since the upgrade produced a new catalogue name (with a -2 appended), I was able to confirm that I was only deleting v1 backups.
• For all months bar the last one, I decided that I only really needed to keep the most recent backup in each month, rather than sometimes all 4 or 5 in a month. I deleted all but the most recent and freed up another 2.64GB of space.

This brought the Backups directly back to a rather svelte 2.42GB.

2. Optimise Catalogue

I hadn’t seen this option before today, so I thought I’d check it and see how it goes. It is accessible via Lightroom > Catalogue Settings, and is a simple ‘Relaunch and Optimise’ button. My catalogue was around 18k photos, and was 262.9MB before optimisation. My Previews file was 101.7MB. Note this figure. After expecting it to take say quarter of an hour to process, I was surprised at how little time it took.

The resulting catalogue saw ~20MB removed and the overall file size brought down to 241.5MB.

I did get a shock when I saw my Previews file though, it had blown out from a lowly 101.7MB to a massive 7.74GB! However, I think this may have been a case of the package (Previews are a package on OS X) under-reporting its true size. I don’t think the optimisation process was busy enough to create 7GB of previews in such a short time! Therefore I think the optimisation actually made the package report the correct size. So I’m not treating this as a ‘loss’ of 7GB

3. Deleting Cruft

In the same directory as my main catalogue, I noted I still had my unloved v1 catalogue, as well as a couple of ‘Temporary Folders’ Lightroom had created that contained a couple of images that I no longer needed. Since these were already backed-up, I just deleted the old catalogue and these temp directories.

4. Rendering Previews

Quite a few of my previews had already been rendered, but I decided to check my rendering settings, and force Lr to render the rest. Library > Previews > Render Standard-sized Previews. I expect I may be facing a 20GB+ Preview file by the time its finished!

5. Adobe Camera Raw cache

As per Lightroom Queen’s article, I went and configured the cache on a separate internal hard drive. I created a new directory called /Cache/Adobe Camera Raw in the root of a second ‘working’ drive and added this in the Lightroom > Preferences > File Handling dialog. I choose the new directory I had created, and upped the somewhat meagre 1GB cache to a more workable 10GB.

Summary

All up, it has been a good little cleaning effort that netted me another ~11.5GB of storage. Which I think I will probably lose to previews. Lightroom doesn’t seem noticeably faster on open, but it does seem quicker to quit. I haven’t spent any other time in it this evening yet to comment on general usage. I’ll report back once I have completed the preview rendering and had a chance to spend a little more time using the optimised Lightroom.

1. Relaunch and Optimize Your Catalog Today – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips
2. Hurry Up Lightroom – Lightroom Queen

Update – amusingly, Adobe limit their submission form to 2000 characters, and mine was about 3600. So I split it in two!

*******Enhancement / FMR*********
Brief title for your desired feature:
Provide configuration option to allow Lightroom to automatically manage files and folders by date and time metadata.

How would you like the feature to work?
1. Lightroom Preferences. I believe there should be a preference option that allows LR to automatically manage all folders and files in a catalogue. In the preferences the user would be able to set the following policies that are applied to all images.

1a. Folder structure – determine the folder structure e.g. yyyy/yy-mm-dd/
1b. File name – determine file name e.g. yyyymmdd-hhmmss-n
1c. Manual or Automatic update – determine whether changes are made immediately when date/time metadata is adjusted (Automatic) or if a user-initiated refiling is undertaken only when the user manually starts the process (Manual). Recommended default should be Automatic (e.g. immediate) updates.
1d. Time field – probably want to default to capture time. Not sure if this approach is useful for other times.

2. When a user imports images using ‘automatic file management’ the file handling import option is greyed out, and indicates that it is being automatically managed and shows the file/folder naming structure selected in the preferences. All other relevant import options are made available.

3. When a user edits date/time information in any way, upon saving the metadata, the image filename, and if necessary the folder it is located in is adjusted to represent the new date/time metadata (Automatic). This results in immediate refiling of the photo when the date/time is adjusted. Otherwise, the image stays in the same location until such time as the user interactive tells Lightroom to refile all images based on their current capture date/time (Manual).

4. If the user opts to change the filing policy set in the preferences – Lightroom should support a complete refiling of the library. E.g. if the directory policy is changed from yyyy/yy-mm-dd/ to yyyy/mm/dd/ then Lightroom should prompt the user to restructure the whole library now under the new policy, and indicate that this may take some time depending on the size of the library

5. Provide an option to check and refile all images that are currently selected (whether in grid, or by folder). This would allow the user to force a manual refile immediately. This option should of course only be visible to users that have enabled automatic filing.

Why is this feature important to you?
I would like to avoid having to manage names and locations of files and folders. I would like to optionally configure Lightroom to fully manage the names and locations of all folders and files. As long as I can define a policy for how the folders and filenames are structured, I am not concerned about having full control over the filename and location. I would like the image metadata to determine where it is stored on the hard drive.

As Lightroom currently stands (v2.3) when the capture date/time is adjusted, the file retains the imported time (which is clearly incorrect) and possibly is stored in the wrong folder (if the time adjustment has been across midnight). This is particularly an issue with travel photos.

It would be very nice to have the option to have all this managed automatically and transparently by Lightroom. Of course this should be an opt-in process only, as it really makes sense for uses that manage their photos using date and time. Conceivably, it may be possible to have Lightroom manage files and folders using other forms of metadata automatically in future, but I believe date and time makes the most sense to start with.

Update: Just to clarify, this is only about changing the second option (time zone adjust) in the adjust time dialog. There are a number of countries that work on 30m TZ offsets – Alaska, a number in South America, Middle East, the Pacific. There is a good table available on this page from the US Naval Observatory.

******BUG******
Concise problem statement:
Timezone adjustment does not support all timezones.

Steps to reproduce bug:
1. Attempt to adjust timezone by -7.5 hours (difference between New Zealand Daylight Time and Sri Lanka time)
2. Only 1 hour increments are available in the time zone adjust drop down combo.
3. Fail!

Results: It is not possible to adjust the timezone in half-hourly increments. After some Googling, I found a very unintuitive workaround that involves selecting the first photo, and adjusting it by the required amount. This is not intuitive enough, and as there are 30 minute timezones, I believe obvious and intuitive support for 30 minute timezones should be included.

Expected results: In addition to the hourly TZ adjustment combo box, there should be another combo to the right that allows selection of 30 minute TZ by selecting either :00 (default) or :30 that is applied in addition to the TZ hour adjustment. This would make it possible to adjust the time to 30 minute timezones (e.g. Sri Lanka and India) in an obvious and intuitive manner.