Today’s Question: For some reason the backup drive of my external drive where I keep all my photos is included in my Lightroom Catalog, so I have duplicates of pretty much all images in the catalog. It seems to me that this is unnecessary and doubles the size of my catalog. Should I just remove the backup drive from the Lightroom Classic catalog and if so, what is the best way to do it?
Tim’s Quick Answer: I do not recommend keeping backup copies of photos in the Lightroom Classic catalog. As long as you’re sure that you’ve only been working with the primary photos (not the backup copies) within Lightroom Classic, you can remove all the backup images in one step by removing the top-level folder.
More Detail: Having backup copies of your photos in the Lightroom Classic catalog is unnecessary and can potentially be quite problematic. For example, there is the risk of confusion with the duplication of images, which might sometimes result in you updating the primary images, while at other times updating the backup images, so that all your updates are not in one place for a given image.
I do recommend first reviewing the backup images to make sure you haven’t been updating them. For example, you could select all of them and then use the Library Filter bar to check various metadata fields to ensure there hadn’t been any updates in your workflow, such as to confirm that none of those images have star ratings or keywords assigned to them.
Once you’re confident that you’ve only been working with the primary images, the backup copies can be removed from the catalog, without deleting them from the hard drive so you’ll still have your backup. Even when you’re feeling confident, however, I do recommend creating an updated backup of your catalog before proceeding.
To remove the duplicate photos, I recommend simply removing the top-level folder. In the Folders section of the left panel in the Library module, if you have a top-level folder for all the photos (such as a “Pictures” folder) you can right-click on that folder and choose “Remove” from the popup menu. If you don’t see a parent folder for the folders that contain your photos, right-click on one of the top-level folders and choose “Show Parent Folder” from the popup. You could repeat this all the way up to the root level of the hard drive if you need to in order to find the top-level location where the folders containing your photos is located. Then remove that top-level folder, which will remove all subfolders and all photos without deleting anything.
In this case you would of course only be removing folders and photos from the backup drive. All folders and photos (and metadata) from the primary hard drive would be unaffected. More importantly, once you perform this task you’ll have a more streamlined catalog in Lightroom Classic. I do recommend backup up your catalog both before and after doing this work, with the options to perform error-checking and optimization enabled for those backups.
