Lightroom Q&A's

Lightroom Catalog FAQ – Should I Delete Old Catalogs?

A couple weeks back I posted about installing Lightroom if you have the Creative Cloud subscription. One of the questions I got back was a really good one so I wanted to post/answer it here.

Q. I’ve upgraded to LR5 and converted my catalogs over to the new version. Should I delete the old LR4 catalog?Is there any reason to keep it?

A. One of the best ways to answer the question is to let you know how Lightroom works when you install a new version. See, it doesn’t take your old catalog and “convert” it. It actually makes a copy of the old catalog and upgrades it to Lightroom 5. The old Lightroom 4 catalog is actually intact just as it always was. If you had a copy of Lightroom 4, you could still open it and use it like you always did. 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. And since Lightroom 5 made a copy of the catalog, it’ll never use it again either.

I hope that helps out. It’s a very popular question and maybe it’ll even help you clean things up and free up some hard drive space. See ya!

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