I work on an iMac with Mavericks. In trying to see what was taking up all my HD space, I find that the Mac Pictures folder is full of all the raw files I have imported to Lightroom, or so it seems. I want to keep all raw files on an exterior 1-2 TB Hard Drive, and they are there in folders per job, per date. If I erase the now huge Pictures Mac folder and delete all, do they delete from LR also? In other words, how can I import to LR for editing, but keep them off my Mac HD, which is only a (2008) 500GB size, so quickly fills up and back to the spinning wheel?
In the Pictures files I find folders like 2013 and 2014, the latter of which has all the dates of a new job I've worked on since January 2014. I did not create this yearly folder, and I only discovered it searching for the reason things were running slow. I thought I was religiously keeping most all imagery out of Pictures on Mac HD.
What am I doing wrong?