fetching initial previews is not working

Forum|Forum|2 months ago
June 12, 2026
9 replies
244 views

As soon as I import, “fetching previews” is stuck. No previews show. I have tried updating, restarting the computer and the application, and going to the catalog settings- face detection was not checked/address lookup not checked / culling not checked.

Correct answer JohanElzenga

Your previews cache may be corrupted. Open your catalog folder and remove ‘catalogname previews.lrdata’ from that folder. Then start Lightroom Classic again. Initially you won’t see any previews, but then Lightroom will start rebuilding them one by one. Now try if importing images creates previews as expected.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Here’s another possible cause: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/how-do-i-change-my-monitor-profile-to-check-whether-its-corrupted/

-- Johan W. Elzenga

Y

yourtallness

Participant

This happens to me for every new catalog, so I doubt this is a matter of preview cache corruption.

I have to restart LR for any images to load and I assume the previews are never built.

Same issue has been reported multiple times on reddit.

About time Adobe acknowledges it.

S

stephenpyle

Participant

Yes, this is happening on all new catalogs… I would have thought this would be fixed by now but it’s absolutely broken as it’s happened several times to me.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Adobe can only fix something if it can reproduce it, and most likely it can’t. If this was a bug that Adobe must fix, then this thread would have hundreds if not thousands of ‘me too’ messages by now. I know this is extremely frustrating, but this is almost certainly caused by something on your system, not some bug in Lightroom. And yes, that ‘something’ could unfortunately corrupt the preview cache of every new catalog too. I wished I could tell you what it could be, but I have no idea. Well, one idea: Could it be some anti-virus software?

-- Johan W. Elzenga

JohanElzenga

Correct answer

Community Expert

Your previews cache may be corrupted. Open your catalog folder and remove ‘catalogname previews.lrdata’ from that folder. Then start Lightroom Classic again. Initially you won’t see any previews, but then Lightroom will start rebuilding them one by one. Now try if importing images creates previews as expected.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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