Lightroom - cleaning up?

[wulinka]

Hey all,

I feel a bit like a Dinosaur, but I am still using Lightroom 1.3... Now my MacBook (Pro) has been getting slower and slooower and slooooower when starting up and I at least to some degree blame it on Lightroom. Someone, I think even here on Shuttertalk, said you could clean up Lightroom in some way, deleting cached stuff etc. I looked through its folders, and one thing I found is hundreds of backups of catalogues. Do I really need all of them, or isn't the most recent enough?
What else can I possibly through out?

Thanks for advise and happy spring time to you all,

Uli

[matthew]

Deleting the old backups is harmless - but keep the last one or two just in case.

Also have a look in the catalog settings/preferences area. It should have the option to "optimize" the catalog, which will make it rebuild the information inside it. That shouldn't have any effect on the speed of the computer overall, but it may make Lightroom a little snappier to work with.

Something else to check is the preview size that it generates, and how long it keeps them for. A full-size preview takes up a massive amount of space, so make sure that you're not keeping them longer than you need to. (But re-rendering them takes a long time - life's a barter.)