Lightroom Desktop: Available space issue

No... I shouldn’t have to lower the space to 1% or something to make up for a bug :)

It might not be a bug. MacOS X has processes that can sometimes take up temporary space (for example Time Machine makes a local backup when your Time Machine disk is not available, but will give up that space when needed for something else), so perhaps Lightroom is including that in its calculation.

And if you want to free up space now, the only way of doing that is taking action yourself. If it is a bug it needs to be corrected, but it the meantime you may want to help yourself by lowering that percentage...

You are talking about "Purgeable disk space" in macOS. I have 117.9MB of Purgeable disk space, so it is not that.

It is empty. And it wouldn’t make any difference. Thanks for the suggestion.

It would. 

In Finder. I also checked Disk Utility.

I checked my version of Lightroom CC and it shows quite a bit LESS free space than the Finder does, not much more. It does indeed not make sense, but my advice stands. If Lightroom thinks there is 100 GB of free space on your disk, and you let it use 25% of that in the preferences, then most likely it is using 25 to 30 GB of disk space to cache images locally. So if you really want to clear up disk space, then change this setting to as low as it gets.

You can say “I shouldn't have to do that” and you're right, but do you want a solution to your problem or not?

In fact, looking at your screenshot confirms this: Lightroom uses 25.86 GB as cache (up from 24.44 GB in your first screenshot)...

Yes I can lower the photo cache. That won’t solve the problem though :) My problem is not that my disk is full, my problem is that Lightroom CC calculates the free space wrongly and thus caches too much locally.

When I get in dire need of disk space, I will indeed lower the photo cache, (thank you for the tip) but hopefully Adobe will fix this bug before that.

Can I contact Adobe with bug reports somehow? I did write in their customer forums but got no replies other than a tip to write here (since this forum seems to be monitored better). I have tried to contact Adobe using the chat but it just tells me to wait and then says “Thank you, bye!” and nothing more...

You've already contacted Adobe. This is the forum to report bugs and request features.

BTW, I would lower that cache right now if I were you. Having only about 10 GB free space is very limited and could be a problem already. Your entire computer may run slower than it has to because there is too little space for temporary storage.

Oh ok. Let’s hope someone from Adobe sees this and takes the appropriate measures to rectify this.

Thank you for your help I really appreciate it!

Hi Linus,

Thanks for your post.

So, as Johan mentioned, you have, indeed, contacted Adobe. I'm one of those guys! We are discussing this issue and will log a bug if it's not already been done. 

Oh nice! Thank you very much!

Yes, it should make it smaller (the 9.92 GB in the preferences), but this may be part of the problem.

It seems to be doing something actually. Now the Lightroom "originals" folder is only 87GB. So in a few weeks it may be at the correct cache size :D

There is supposed to be some intelligence built-in to the space management process. Although I don't have any specifics on what checks are done, I can easily imagine for example that deleting the imported files from the local system, as soon at they have been synced and backed up, might be delayed for a while depending on actual free space on the drive and frequency of access. I've just checked and, although I do not have the "Store a copy locally" enabled, some imports I did back in early February are still in the local cache.....and furthermore, LRCC knows it. So if I access those files frequently (which I would more likely do in the month or two after import) I would expect LRCC to use the local copy in preference to downloading the original from the cloud whenever I open the file in Detail view. But as my use of those files becomes less and less frequent, they'd more likely become eligible for deletion.

I have no problem with that behaviour provided it does take actual free space availability into consideration. I have plenty of free space on the drive in question, so can't really test that.

Isn’t that the exact opposite issue?

I just went ahead and deleted the local folder for the originals.  I'll keep the copy on the external drive for awhile in case I need it.  I restarted LRCC and opened one photo.  I looked at the cache folder location that I deleted and LRCC recreated the folder and it was only 4Mb.  LRCC had rebuilt the year/date folder structure and it contained the file of the photo I opened.  Not surprised, it still needs a cache location to do its work.  Now LRCC says I have 313Gb free and Windows says I have 283Gb free.  I'm guessing LRCC is still using that 30Gb  space somewhere it is counting as free space.  And I'm guessing it is in 
C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\Adobe\Lightroom CC\Data
because that folder is 30Gb.  Could be a coincidence. 
I will increase the size of the LRCC cache setting and try working with it for awhile to see if I have lost much performance.  If I need to I will turn on the local smart preview option, I've heard it works well.  
I'm still disgusted with Adobe for not getting the disk space numbers right.  And I am especially disgusted with them for not making it easier/obvious how to really clear that disk space when UNselecting the Store all originals locally option.  If their intent is to make photo management more intuitive and less dependent on operating system intervention they haven't got it right yet.

Same problem for me, and since all the time I use LRCC. I deleted and reinstalled the software, same problem... currently Lightroom believe's I have 130GB of free disk space; My setting is set to 10%, which would make you assume Lightroom should use 13GB, right? But no, when I look at the library in finder, it's currently at 75GB. It is truly sad to see one of the biggest software companies not being able to fix such a seemly clear issue.