difference between the "all my files" photos and the "pictures" photos.

I have a mac air and use adobe Lightroom for my image processing. I have most all of my images backed up on an external hard drive as well as my LR catalog. My question is this, my storage space on hard drive is almost full with photos. Does Lightroom draw from the "all my files " images (which have a zillion copies of everything), or do they draw from the "pictures " file. This too is full of duplicates. My question is mainly, what is the difference between the "all my files" photos and the "pictures" photos. Also , i never use my IPhoto. Any help would be very much appreciated.

All My Files is a "smart folder". It's not a separate 'real' folder like your pictures folder. It's just a way of showing you all your user folders in one place. It's really just showing you your Pictures/Music/Movies/Documents/Downloads folders all at the same time.

Lightroom will pull photos in from wherever you point it. Look in Preferences in Lightroom to find the default path.

thank you

Dear Mrplow, Thank you for your reply. Im new to this and not sure I'm responding correctly. I understand what you said but am wondering something else. Are the "all my files" photos the hard drive images and can i delete those. Also, when looking for images in lightroom and there are several versions, should I always use the "pictures" file images? Thanks again, Liz

MRplow, one other thing. I open the pictues file and get folders by the year and then more folders by the month. is there any way to view them all at one time or all together in thumbnails?

Sorry if this is stuff you already know. But I need to get my reply clear in my head as well as explaining to you as I don't want to suggest deleting files without backups and some assurance what you're doing is non-destructive.

The lightroom catalog is a database. Fundamentally a list of the locations and data pertaining to your images. It doesn't contain your actual image files.

Lightroom is, at it's simplest, a way of interacting with your images. These images can be in folders on an external USB drive, your local drive, a network drive etc. Lightroom just notes where the files and keeps data about them in the catalog.

So there are two halves to the puzzle.
Lightroom with it's catalog and the real location of the files. Both need to be kept in sync with one another. If you want to change the location of your images, perhaps your hard disk on your Mac is filling up you must do this from within Lightroom. This is the only way it can update the location information and keep the physical location and catalog in sync.

So, where to go from here.

This is what I would do:
1. Get an external hard disk, at least as big as your Mac hard disk (I'd suggest twice the size). Use Time Machine to backup your whole machine (lets call this extHD1).
2. Move the catalog to your Mac hard disk (it'll perform faster from here)
3. Use Lightroom to open the catalog and then use lightroom to relocate all your images to your existing external disk (extHD2)
4. From now on new images get imported to extHD2 and then added to Lightroom.
5. Not forgetting the images on extHD2 will need a backup strategy. Whether included in the Time Machine backup and/or backed up online.

Hope some of that helps