High Resolution Smart Previews for Lightroom

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It is 2026 and Smart Previews for Lightroom still have the same resolution of 2560px on the long side. So they’ve stayed the same since the introduction of Lightroom 5 in 2013.

I’d argue it's time to increase the resolution to at least 4K. Our monitors got bigger and our hard drives and bandwidth did too.

I know it would add some trouble for Adobe as the smart Previews are also used to sync between devices and on the cloud, but those of us who use them in a laptop workflow should at least have an option to choose a higher resolution for offline usage.

What do you guys think?

F

Florian O.Author

Known Participant

@JohanElzenga Sorry, don’t get me wrong. Of course your opinion is legit. It just felt your opinion was all about the “I don’t need it so why would someone else do.”

For me it has always been about performance. Like many of us I had my system upgrades over the last couple years - coming from Intel I upgraded first to a base M1, then M2 Pro and now I’m working with an M4 Max.

And while certain things became faster it still has the same amount of delay ( loading or rendering time ) when going from picture to picture with the original file while editing. The only way to overcome that sluggishness is and has always been to activate the Smart Previews.

I don't see any performance improvements on Adobes side, so they could at least give us higher resolution Smart Previews to compensate for this.

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JohanElzenga

Community Expert

You asked for opinions, so I explained why I personally don’t need it, and why I think that this will apply to most people using a laptop workflow. That is not at all the same as saying: “I don’t need it so why would someone else do.”

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-- Johan W. Elzenga

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Most people who have a laptop workflow and use smart previews because their originals are offline, will probably travel with that laptop. That means most of these people will not use a 4K screen, but a laptop screen. I travel 50% of my time that way. My 16” MacBook Pro screen is usually set to 1920 x 1400 pixels, so the current size of smart previews is good enough for me.

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-- Johan W. Elzenga

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Florian O.Author

Known Participant

Might be true for you. It still comes in very handy when plugging the MacBook into a 27” 5K Display. A 4K Smart Preview would give you a correct Retina resolution for the displayed image. And it does not have to load the original file when memory is scarce or the M-Chip is an older one.

When you do the math a 4K Smart Preview would increase the file size only by about 50% ( or x1.50 ). That would be a good tradeoff for increased performance and an easier workflow.

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JohanElzenga

Community Expert

You asked for opinions, so I gave you mine. I’m not going to argue over it. At home I use two 4K displays, but at home I don’t use smart previews, because there my originals are available to me. By the way: your math is incorrect. To increase the size to 4K, both the height and the width will be increased 1.5 times, so the total number of pixels will be more than double (225%).

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-- Johan W. Elzenga

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