Quick LR question

When you folks import a shot into LR3, make some edits, then export it back out, do you delete it from the "folders" area in the left panel? It seems as if over time there could be a lot of folders to accumulate there. What would be the purpose of leaving all these in that area? I still have yet to figure out the cataloging aspect of LR. Thanks

If you remove the Raw files from LR, your edits will not be saved unless you save the edits to xmp.
Furthermore: LR is a DAM. So you can use it to search images. Why would you want to remove them?
My LR catalog contains 20k+ images....

What I do:

I import a shoot into a "current shoot" folder on my internal data drive -- as I import I name a folder and the individual files with a date/description-specific name.

I do all my short-term processing, keywording, and exports for the Web and other things if needed.

I then move the individual shoots/folders within Lightroom to a folder specified by year. These folders are on external hard drives. I also back everything up to a separate external drive.

So, all my original images stay in my LR catalog organised by year. Stuff that I've exported don't, although I do keep an archive of images posted to my Web host.

The answer is not to automatically export after every edit, but rather only when you have a specific need for a jpg and after you have used it to delete the jpg. The catalog entry listing the location of your files and the edits you have done and/or the keywords you have assigned is only a couple hundred KB, much smaller than any jpg and much, much smaller than a tif. It's not the catalog (*.lrcat) file that takes up room on your hard disc, but rather the two types of profiles, Library profiles and Develop profiles, and there steps that you can take to limit them. You can (in Catalog Settings) set LR to discard 1:1 profiles after one day or one week. You can also set it to make small, low quality profiles. And if disc space is really a problem you can trash the profiles - LR will rebuild them only if and when they are needed - but this will slow down browsing in the Library module. Regarding Develop profiles, you can (in Preferences) set a limit to the size of the Camera Raw cache or purge it periodically - again, with the understanding that the need to create the preview from scratch will increase its loading time in Develop should you ever want to edit it again.

Thanks for you time and responses. In the coming week I will be figuring all this out. I have the Scott Kellby book and I will come back to your posts. Thanks!