jgmc

I had an old version of Lightroom with some photos that I had just played around with. All photos on my Mac Pro are backed up. My question is when I opened the new Lightroom 6, the old photos showed up and I would like to start over. I recently retired and have time to learn the program and need a fresh start. Can someone tell me how to get rid of what is already there?

pithydoug Loc: Catskill Mountains, NY

What means start over? You can do a lot of moving and renaming within LR to get a different structure. If that is too cumbersome, you could also copy them to a separate drive directory(outside of LR) and then delete all the files within LR and re-import all, some, non with what ever naming convention you want.

The second choice will likely lose the sidecar files if you were using raw.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

The photos are are your disk, the only way Lightroom sees them is that they were imported into the catalog, well, not really imported. Basically the catalog keeps track of pointers that tell Lightroom where your images are.

To start all over, simply create a new catalog, it will be empty then you can import any images you want - all of your old photos will still be on your disk.

Do not go down the path of creating lots of different catalogs though - Lightroom can handle many many photos with only one catalog ;)

jgmc

Is there any way to delete a catalog?

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

Create a new catalog then use your OS to delete it - it is just a file.

It will have an .lrcat file and a .LRdata file (previews) as part of each catalog.

If you are new to Lightroom and just getting it set up, you might want to watch several of the getting started videos at adobe TV to get off on the right foot

http://tv.adobe.com/product/lightroom/show/a2z/

SueMac Loc: Box Elder, SD

You can select all the photos in the old catalog and do a right mouse click and go down to the bottom of that pop up window and choose Remove. That will bring up another window. To remove the photos from the catalog be sure to just choose "Remove". This will take the pix out of the catalog. Then you can go to Finder and find where the catalog resides. Usually in your Pictures folder. Select it and delete it. When doing this be sure not to choose "Delete from Disc" when removing the photos from the LR catalog. That will delete all the pix and send them to the trash. Just do a "remove". That keeps them on your hard drive. Once you have removed the photos and deleted the current catalog click on the LR icon in the doc and LR will start again. It will tell you it can't find a current catalog. Follow the prompts and create a new default one. And you're ready to go with a whole new set up.