Catalog Contents
I have one Catalog on my imac that is 136Gb in size, however I store all the original picture files on an external hard drive. I believe that is called referenced files. Why would the catalog have such a large size? Is there a way to find out exactly what is causing the catalog to be this big? There is nothing in the "In Catalog" section in "folders".
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The catalog contains
- previews of the images - the previews are stored in the catalog whether or not the images are managed or referenced
- edit information for each image
- information about things like albums, smart albums, projects etc.
- original images (ONLY if any are stored "in catalog, which yours are not)
By far the largest part of that (if images are NOT stored in the catalog) will be the previews.
I have a catalog of just over 50,000 images, and like yours, I have none of them "in catalog". The Previews folder inside the catalog package is 123 GB. The whole catalog is 130 GB.
How many images does your catalog have? If it's comparable in numbers to mine, I'd think that the size of your catalog is fairly normal. How much space the previews take up will depend on the preview size you have set in Capture One settings (which should be whatever is appropriate to your monitor resolution) and also, if you have one of the more recent versions of Capture One, on whether in Settings preview generation is set to optimised for quality or optimised for speed.
Ian
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Thank you Ian. I have about 63 000 images. I chose the recommended preview size setting and optimized for quality. I'm guessing that to free up space on my hard drive I would have to get my catalog onto the external drive with the pictures. Or is there another way to use less space with the catalog. Thanks again. Martin
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So yours is similar in size to mine. How short of space are you on the internal drive?
Ian
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I'm getting messages about deleting stuff to make space. Within a few GB and less at times. I may have to delete something else but that's another problem in itself. Martin
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One way of using a bit less space would be to choose the other option (optimised for speed) and regenerate the previews. How much space you will save I am not sure, but see the article here.
I don't suggest you change the setting and regenerate all the previews. But you could change it then regenerate the previews for a small number of images and see whether they are of satisfactory quality for your needs. If they are, you could do more, but still not the whole catalog in one go!
You can have the catalog on an external drive but by all accounts in runs best on the internal drive. A lot probably depends on the speed of the external drive and of the connection to it.
Ian
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I have 66,000 images and my catalog is about 132GB in size with 4K quality optimized previews. I always get at least 1TB drives for my system disk. I store the catalog on internal SSD storage and reference original images on external SSD with Thunderbolt connection.
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Thanks everyone. Next time I buy an iMac I'll get a larger internal drive. I found some space by deleting caches. So for now I'm good. I'm also going to purge a bunch of photos which I probably should have done along the way. Saved time then. Paying for it now. Thanks again.
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Yeah, John, I don't like that feeling either. I may look into trying to upgrade. Martin
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