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crsouser
Known Participant
January 26, 2012
Open for Voting

P: Lighroom Preview.lrdata, allow it to be put in different location of catalog

  • January 26, 2012
  • 19 replies
  • 597 views

I have pitched this in other forums.. I HAVE READ the How to Optimize Lightroom performance and acted on every item and then some I have figured out on my own as well as read elsewhere.

Though through all of this one of the things I cannot still do to both better manage diskspace and performance is seperate my Previews.lrdata file from the Catalog.lrcat. My previews, images, program, and catalog themselves are stored off on separate drives.. but the previews file is still full of images and over 60 gigs at the particular moment and I regularly purge it off down to 0.

I would like to be able to put all of these items in separate drive locations if I choose. Today I have items 1-4 in separate locations.
1) Program / OS
2) RAW Images
3) Catalog.lrcat
4) Previews
5) Previews.lrdata

Christopher

    19 replies

    Show previous replies
    areohbee
    areohbee
    Legend
    November 23, 2012
    Fair enough - point taken. - thanks, R.
    C
    cyberesben
    Participant
    November 23, 2012
    test
    C
    cyberesben
    Participant
    November 23, 2012
    Rob: The problem is that if you use dropbox for storing the catalog (like me), it often gets confused about the symlinks and it also creates a confusing setup if you access the catalog from multiple computers
    areohbee
    areohbee
    Legend
    June 6, 2012
    You can do this now (relocate previews) using a symbolic link on Mac, and there's some technique on Windows too, but I don't remember details - it's in a fairly recent thread about this, somewhere...
    F
    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    June 5, 2012
    I totally am for it. There's another problem that will get solved this way (I just posted an idea about it also): SSDs are limited in size and price, but are perfect for catalogs (due to their fast small block reads/writes, eg the PAtriot Wildfire 120GB or 480GB). Unfortunately, if you use 1:1 previews (as anybody interested in LR performance should), then those will eat into the catalog's drive massively, and even a 480GB SSD maxes out at 100000 1:1 previews - so today it's either 1:1 previews or SSD, not both :-(. (yea, even with a $4000 RAID-5 480GB SSDs you max out after 300K images, so this is not a solution).
    F
    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    January 27, 2012
    I'd welcome the ability to have different locations for the preview data and the catalog data.

    Sometimes I want to backup all my catalogs. All my catalogs live under one folder, but I cannot simply backup that folder since this would cause all preview data to become part of the backup as well.
    H
    helen_gossweiler
    Inspiring
    January 26, 2012
    Ahh, OK, then you should call it "ACR cache", as "Previews" is the term used for what's in the * Previews.lrdata folder.

    I agree that using symbolic links should not be necessary, and a configuration option in catalog settings would be nice. That's why I voted for it :-)

    Beat
    C
    crsouserAuthor
    Known Participant
    January 26, 2012
    Maybe I should have elaborated a bit more on #4 & #5 as what I understand they do and from my testing not the same..and if so.. why would the function and space be duplicated. If I have to create symbolic links (an OS manipulation) isn't that re-emphasizing the need for the feature with the program so the symbolic link work around is not required.

    For example on my Mac:
    #4 is in /Volumes/MacHD1/LR_Cache0/ as defined in the preferences-File Handling->Camera Raw Cache
    But #5 is in
    #5 is in /Volumes/CRS_SD_0/Users/UserName/Documents/LightroomCat/CRS_LR3_Catalog Previews.lrdata.
    H
    helen_gossweiler
    Inspiring
    January 26, 2012
    I voted for your idea. But:
    - No. 4+5 are the same issue
    - Purging the previews folder is not what you should be doing
    - as of now you can separate the previews by use of symbolic links

    Beat
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