Inspiring

Question

lightroom catalogue and previews

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
January 16, 2020
3 replies
679 views

I note that my LR catalogue which is stored on my internal hard drive has gotten very large, more than 200 GB. Of this, about 180GB are previews. I am not sure if I can remove these previews because I am runnign out of room on my hard drive. If I can remove these previews,and still be able to access the files for editing etc, how would I go about it.

Feature request

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JohanElzenga

Community Expert

You have to understand the difference between previews and smart previews. Lightroom generates previews of all images, and that is what you are looking at when you look at an image in Lightroom. If you delete the previews, Lightroom will rebuild them for each image you look at. That means that in due time, the previews file/folder will become large again.

Smart previews aren't really previews at all and have nothing to do with normal previews. They are small proxies for your original files, so you can edit your images even when the originals are offline. You do not need to build smart previews if the originals are never offline or if you never want to edit them in that situation.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

S

santpadAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks John for that explanation.

I guess the LR catalogue folder is going to be large in my case, since I have a lot of images.

The solution would be to store the catalogue also in an external drive, and I intend to do that in a large SSD drive connected via Thunderbolt 3

dj_paige

Legend

If you are really running out of space on your hard drive, you can't solve the problem by removing the previews because Lightroom will generate them again.

Some things you can try.

Tell Lightroom to only keep the previews for a week (or other short period of time), but of course if Lightroom removes the previews, they will be regenerated as needed
Move the photos to a different hard drive (if the photos are part of the problem)
Move the catalog and previews to a different hard drive.
Use a symbolic link to relocate the previews.

S

santpadAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks for your suggestions.

The photos themselves are in an external hard drive so that is not a problem. Only the catalogue is in the internal hard drive

My current idea is to the catalogue also to an external hard drive - an SSD drive through a thunderbolt 3 connection, so it does not slow down.

I am not sure how I can get LR to keep the previews only for a short period of time.

I am also not sure how to create a symbolic link

By the way, I discarded all smart previews except for the most recent images (maybe 500 or so ) , but the catalogue still shows the same size for previews. When I check my library, there are no previews for the earlier images (other than the most recent ones) Confusing.

Akash Sharma

Legend

Hi there,

The Smart previews generated by Lightroom do take some extra space on your storage device and if you still have the original images you can simply backup your Lightroom catalog and discard the previews. Note that you may also choose Lightroom to generate only minimal previews so that you do not face such problem in future. See https://helpx.adobe.com/in/lightroom-classic/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

Thanks,

Akash

S

santpadAuthor

Inspiring

I have removed all smart previews, but the catalogue still shows a folder
with previews using up about 180GB

--
*Venkat Santosh*
*Mobile : 804-241-5900*

*Work : 804-560-5976*

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