p.1 #1 · Advice on Getting Rid of a Lightroom Catalog?
I am just starting out with Lightroom. I made a false start and created a catalog that I do not want to keep. I can find nothing in any menu, or in the Kelby Lightroom book, about how to delete a Lightroom catalog. Maybe it is not even an issue. Maybe you just create the new catalog you want and leave the false start catalog in place. But it feels like it could be a hazard at some point, having the old one lying around ready to open by accident and soak up work effort. I realize I can delete the unwanted catalog in the finder, but then presumably Lightroom is going to just keep wondering and asking where it went. Am I imagining a problem that does not even exist? What is the right way to proceed?
As the paragraph above probably shows, my understanding is pretty rudimentary, so feel free especially to explain why these are dumb questions, if they are.
p.1 #3 · Advice on Getting Rid of a Lightroom Catalog?
When you use Lr you get to tell it which catalog to use when it starts up. It does not go looking for missing catalogs or any other catalog unless you have not yet told it to use the new one. So the problem you imagined can exist but does not have to.
Do not delete everything within a catalog until you are certain that you know how to avoid deleting your master photos from your drives. Easier to just not work that way for now.
As a new user I'm sure you can get away with always using a single catalog to hold everything (even on multiple folders on multiple drives) until you've learned the pros and cons of splitting that into multiple catalogs. Therefore you tell Lr to always start with same catalog.
What was the nature of the "false start" that you made ? Are you sure that it is not more efficient to work with it rather than to start again ? What makes you so sure ? You ought to sort this out before deleting what you've already done. You might even find that further experimentation with the crappy catalog is still preferable to starting again and having to delete that one too.
The Lr catalog comes in three main parts:
The catalog itself (.lrcat) that can be deleted in Finder after you manage the other parts.
The Lr preview cache, which should be purged from within Lr.
The ACR cache, which should also be purged from within Lr.
