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Lightroom Memory
I had noticed that my 128 GB SSD card was getting full. I thought it was because of unprocessed photos that I had stored on it, so I've slowly been catching up and processing the photos. In the end, that only accounted for part of the problem. So, I've been going through trying to find what is taking up so much memory. Turns out several GB are Lightroom related.
This has included the following:
- Old versions of Lightroom. Under the "desktop" there were all of my old versions of Lightroom. I had assumed that the upgrading would have deleted them, as only the most recent version shows up in the control panel under "uninstall," but I found several under "users/.../Desktop." I've now deleted all but the last two.
- Backup files. I backup Lightroom weekly. Turns out that old backups are all stored. I had 9.9 GB (77 files) under the "backup" folder. I've now deleted all but a handful of the back up files.
- Previews. 2.2 GB (16,400 files) of Lightroom previews. I haven't decided what I am going to do with those.
It looks like Lightroom requires some maintenance. But, I just freed up ~11 GB on my SSD card.
Now I need to go figure out if I can delete the files under .../windows/winsxs (12.6 GB/57,000 files), .../windows/system32 (3.2 GB/15,000 files), and .../sysWOW64 (1.1 GB/4,600 files). But that will be tomorrow. :D
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Can you adjust the size of the Previews that are generated? In Apple aperture it made a difference: default was half the original size, I changed it to monitor resolution
Arnt
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I have 17 GB of Lightroom catalog backups, but I keep them all on an external hard drive (which is then mirrored to a second drive, and further backed up with CrashPlan). I try to store nothing on my computer hard drive except program files. But I did notice that I still had LR 4 on my drive, so I uninstalled that and saved 0.8 GB. Thanks for the tip!
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Just to be anal-retentive, your SSD card is storage (remains viable even if your computer loses its pulse), not memory (suffers brain death within moments of cardiac/motivated electron interruption).
Now for actual contributory content, because my wife and I occasionally work on projects "together", we treat each job as a separate catalog. Once the job is done, we copy the job to external HD storage hanging off our Time Capsule, delete the folder off our internal HD, and create a new catalog for the next job. Since we usually edit the job within days of the shoot, we don't bother with LR Catalog backups, as it's kept as a backup via Time Machine on a different drive and then cloned to alternate external HDs as part of our off-site backup routine. I made it a long time on a 160GB internal HD on my MacBook Pro that way.
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I wouldn't go deleting things from System32 unless you know *exactly* what you're doing. And I mean not following someone's internet post, but actually understand what the file does that you're thinking of deleting. System32 contains thousands of critical and shared libraries that programs and Windows need to function.
In regards to your WinSxS directory, read this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2795190
If you're comfortable making your updates and service packs permanent and uninstallable, follow the directions. Generally, in my opinion, if your computer has been running fine for a while, there's nothing wrong with making your Windows state permanent. Note that this does not mean you can't uninstall programs or use System Restore.
Windows also includes a Disk Cleanup utility that can reclaim space.
Any chance your computer supports more than one internal hard drive? Is it in your budget to get a bigger SSD -- assuming it's not some proprietary SSD card?
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The files Lightroom leaves on the desktop should be the install files that were downloaded. You can delete those after your install is good (or keep the latest in case you need it).
As an IT guy, I would be hesitant to mess with files in the windows directory. Just remove older versions if they are still installed via the control panel (which it sounds like you only have the latest).
If you have an SSD and a traditional internal harddrive, you can move your backups to there.
I also try to keep very little on the computer harddrives. I put as much of my data (including the photos) on an external network drive. It contains 2 mirrored drives. That way I can easily access it from all the computers on the network as well as make it easier to change computers.
Eric
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Thanks everyone. I did stay away from modifying the windows files. I was able to free up about 8 GB of space by processing photos, another ~20 GB of space by cleaning up the folders used by mostly by Lightroom and the iPhone, and finally another ~5-7 GB seemed to open up (I am not sure how or why) when I implemented most of the recommendations from OCZ (my SSD is a OCZ Agility 3) found here. The few recommendations I didn't follow included the disabling the disk defragmentor and I am not in ACHI mode. I have 3 HDDs and 1 SSD on my computer and I made sure that the SSD wasn't on the disk defragmentor schedule, only the HDDs and when I checked my computer isn't in ACHI mode, but I need to look into what that is and how to make the switch. But my SSD is now close to where I remember it originally being in terms of open space.
Next I am working on start up time as it used to be ~ 20 sec and is now ~55 sec. There are probably a lot of downloaded programs starting up in the background that I need to clean up. I am also evaluating potential upgrades. I've already checked and my 8 GB of RAM doesn't seem to be near its limits (~4-6 GB is usually "available," although "Cached" is ranging from 1 GB to 6 GB). The 4 cores of the Athlon 3.0 GHz Quad core all max out when converting RAW to JPG and routinely jump to ~60-70% while I am making adjustments to photos in Lightroom. But, on the other side, it only took an avg of 5.5-6 secs to process each photo from a 15 photo group when I timed it recently, so while I am tempted to upgrade my CPU, it may not be needed.
BTW, there are a couple of things driving this: 1) my SSD card at one point only had ~6 GB of available space; 2) my computer is 2.5 years old and I thought it was time to look at it, and 3) process times when making changes to photos in LR can be a little (couple of seconds delay) slow. I am thinking #3 is either the CPU, GPU, or the fact that I have been processing photos from my HDD recently because of the lack of space on my SDD. I think my HDD drive may enter sleep mode relatively often as I can sometimes here it start to spin when the changes are slow in LR.
