Can you disable saving export history in Lightroom?

Question

In Lightroom I find I tend to export the same image multiple times, overtime I may export the same image for multiple purposes tens of times. Now I understand the change history, it's rather useful and I do tend to use it. However. At the top of the list it's littered with 'exported at...'. Personally I don't beleive this information is useful (to me) unlike the other changes, e.g. sliders or brushes edits which allow you to step through edits and just means I have to scroll.

Is there a way to either hide or disable recording of this information? (Alternatively if there's part of the export history and why it's useful i've overseen, please feel free to share).

(Also Stack is telling me (based on the title) this question is subjective and likely to be closed?)

Answer 1

There is no way to disable those steps in the standard lightroom.

The steps are stored in the catalog's database in the table Adobe_LibraryimageDevelopHistoryStep. Just based on prior work at accessing the database directly I believe those specific rows could be found and deleted, but clearly there are no guarantees this would not cause problems somewhere in Adobe's code, since it would be an unsupported action.

It is worth noting that the history does not have the negative impact on performance many people believe, so removing these is almost entirely cosmetic, not a functional improvement -- the history is kept separate from the actual development information. For example, if you increase exposure a stop, then decrease, then increase, then decrease, it stores the result (+0) for use when rendering the image. It happens to also store the history for your own information, but it does not replicate the +/-/+/- steps each time, so there is negligible impact from keeping the history (just a slight increase in database size).

So short answer: No, you cannot disable just the export steps' visibility in any straightforward way.