The problem was this. Lightroom was slow. Everything was slow. Thankfully I decided to look at why.
And the problem was quite simple.
I make a duplicate set of images when I import from a memory card into Lightroom.
Once I have done my external back-ups I should remove these files from my Dell PC hard drive. As i said my computer was running a bit (ok very) slow this morning so I checked the hard drive capacity.
Turns out I haven’t been doing this for some time, so I deleted everything up to April 2017, and gained back nearly 300GB of hard drive space!!!
I emptied my recycle bin next and gained back another 15GB of hard drive space.
And what a difference this has made!
I thought I was going to have to buy a new computer. But no. All is good.
Maintenance is a necessary evil. With my construction experience I know that if you don’t maintain buildings they fail.
Cameras, computers, lenses – they all need maintaining.
I wonder how many people who are complaining about the speed of Lightroom actually have their own houses in order? I didn’t for sure.
I was about to join the masses on this subject, but now that i have freed up over 25% of the capacity of my PCs hard drive it is working just fine.
I now have circa 400GB of space free, whereas before my maintenance job I had around 100GB of free hard drive space. And now that I think about it it was not just Lightroom that was slow – everything was. And everything is fine now.
So the important thing that we all need to do is to remember to look after our computers and the data we keep.
Our PCs and the information on them are so important to us these days, so the time investment in maintaining this critical data and equipment should not be considered as an optional task. I am going to be taking the maintenance of my computer and the data held on it and my various external hard drives much more seriously in the future.