Lightroom Tips

Tip – Lightroom PSDs and Drive Space

I’m going back nearly a year and pulling an oldie-but-goodie tip. The reason is because I’m not so good about following my own tips so I figured a few of you may have forgotten about this one too. It’s the tip about deleting your old PSD files. I sat down to clear some drive space today and used my own tip and I wound up getting rid of 1.2 Gig. Apparently I hadn’t done this in a while 🙂
Now, I’ll admit it’s gotten a lot better since Lightroom 2 came out. In Lightroom 1, it automatically created a PSD file as soon as you went into Lightroom, regardless of whether you saved it or not in Photoshop. In Lightroom 2, you’ve actually got to save the file. But I still end up saving a lot of PSD files that I don’t really need, hence the 1.2 gig of space taken up by them. So here’s the tip (updated for Lightroom 2):

1) Go to the Library module and click on All Photographs under the Catalog panel on the left hand side to view all of your photos.

2) Now hit the (backslash) key to show the Filter Bar.

3) Click on the Metadata Filter at the top.

4) If you don’t see File Type as an option to filter by at the top (and you probably won’t) hover over one of the options you do see (like “Camera” or “Date”), click on it and choose File Type near the top of the list.

5) Now click on the “Photoshop Document (PSD)” and you’ll filter Lightroom to only show the PSD files.

6) Select the PSDs that you don’t need anymore by Ctrl/Cmd – clicking on them.

7) Hit the Delete key to delete those photos. If Lightroom asks if you want to remove them from the library or delete from your hard drive go ahead and choose the Delete from Drive option.

As I mentioned, I got rid of about 1.2 gig by doing this. I realize a lot of my PSDs probably come from doing a lot of demos, but I’d still bet you’ll free up a decent amount of hard drive space from getting rid of PSDs that you don’t need anymore. In fact, I think it’d by cool to see how much space you save so leave a comment and let us know how much you free up.

Have a great weekend!

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