Today’s Question: I renamed my Lightroom Classic catalog and associated files using the Rename Catalog command as you suggested. Is there any reason to keep the previous catalogs and files from when Lightroom automatically renamed with upgrades? I assume catalog backups made prior to renaming can be deleted?
Tim’s Quick Answer: As long as you are sure that the catalog files in question are from older versions of Lightroom Classic or are backup copies, deleting those files won’t cause any problems for your current catalog.
More Detail: While Adobe has made helpful changes to Lightroom Classic in terms of how catalog updates are handled, many photographers still have accumulated copies of outdated catalog files, as well as old backup copies of catalogs.
As long as you’re certain of which files relate to the current catalog, and that any unrelated files are not needed, it is safe to delete those files not associated you’re your current catalog. For example, the earlier versions of the current catalog that were from earlier versions of Lightroom Classic don’t need to be retained. In addition, numerous backup copies of your current catalog (or of prior catalogs) don’t need to be retained.
I do, however, recommend keeping a few catalog backups from various times, just so you have something to fall back on in case you run into an issue of corruption with your current catalog that might also have affected a recent backup. Obviously, the older a catalog backup is the less helpful it would be to recover from, since there may be many photos and updates that aren’t reflected in that older catalog backup.
Note, by the way, that one of the things I highly recommend doing to help minimize the harm that would be caused by a lost or corrupted catalog is to make sure the “Automatically write changes into XMP” checkbox is turned on, which can be found on the Metadata tab of the Catalog Settings dialog in Lightroom Classic.
