I’ve highlighted the keepers in red.īy the presence of the. Let’s try to sort out what is important to keep. And to be fair, no one should just start deleting files unless you are sure about what you are deleting, so it is easy to see how this kind of thing can build up. Now, not meaning any judgement here as we all have our own messes to clean up from time to time. Now, if you have not been as diligent as I have in keeping that folder under control over the years, you might end up with a situation that looks something like this. If you’ve synced your Lightroom Classic catalog to Lightroom cloud and you have not configured a custom destination for photos downloaded from the cloud then you might also see a Mobile Downloads.lrdata file, which is where those photos are stored. The Helper.lrdata serves as a cache for the Folder panel search. If you’ve never created smart previews then you would only have one preview cache. lrdata files are preview caches that contain the previews used by Lightroom to represent your photos. lock file and Lightroom Classic should open normally. If that ever happens to you, you can simply delete the.

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. lock and -wal files are removed under normal operation. Here’s that same folder after Lightroom Classic has been shut down. Now, this screen capture shows what it looks like when the catalog is open. (Names and places have been changed to protect the innocent) Under Normal Circumstancesīefore we get into that, I wanted to share what files are typically found in the folder where your Lightroom Classic catalog is located. I got a good example of what this can look like, so I thought it would be helpful to others if we took a closer look. Over time, it is easy for files to build up in the folder where your catalog is stored, and it can be overwhelming for a lot of people to sort through them all to separate the wheat from chaff. This is fairly common question on the KelbyOne Lightroom Help Desk.

Adobe lightroom 5 catalog