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Paolo Fidanzati
Paolo Fidanzati
December 13, 2025
Question

Preview randomly disappeared on newly imported photos

  • December 13, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 187 views

Hello, I run LR classic 15.0.1 and after a recent images import and subsequent creation of advanced preview, the previews in grid module are not showed for mostly (but not all) the newly added photos.

If I add the column the tells presence / absence of previews in the filter section, the photo for which previews are not displayed are reported as having previews.

 

Trying to generate 1:1 or standard previews for the same photos will cause LR to start a new preview creation job, still at 0% even after hours.

 

I run my catalogue on external SSD drive with about 600.000 photos and, so far, advanced previews created for almost all of the photos contained in the catalogue.

 

I'm not sure that deleting all the existing advanced previews and recreating them (operation that could last days and days) wouls solve the issue.

 

Any hint on it?

 

Thank your all for support.

1 reply

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 13, 2025

This definitely sounds like your 'catalogname previews.lrdata' is corrupted. Drag it out of your catalog folder and then start Lightroom Classic. Lightroom will rebuild the previews, so initially you will not see any previews at all, but then they should start appearing one by one. If that doesn't work you can always replace the new previews by the old ones, but I am convinced this will work and solve the problem. By the way: I am not sure what you mean by "advanced previews". If you mean smart previews, then do not delete or remove these. Smart previews have nothing to do with the previews you see in the Lightroom grid. Their name is misleading, because smart previews are not previews at all.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga
C
catherine26821158od07
Participant
December 18, 2025

For some days now I have had this annoying problem with grey "previews" in LR CLassic, a catalog for more than 41.000 pictures regularly updated and optimised. Moving from the Library to the Develop module would ressuscitate the preview including in the Library module, except that doing the same for another preview would make the previous picture preview disappear again. I tried this morning dragging the previews.data out of the catalog folder, as you recommend, and restarted, to no avail: the catalog would only create previews for 150some MB, therefore instead of a few (only the recent ones) I had lost almost every preview. I deleted this new and almost empty previews.data file, reinserted in the catalog folder the previous previews.data file, and voilà! every preview is back including those that wouldn't be created since a week or so. Hoping this can be helpful (and that the solution will last...)

My system: Mac Studio 36GB RAM Tahoe 26.1 storage on a WD 12TB

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 18, 2025

Good to hear that the problem seems to be fixed. If it starts again, then you may still need to use my recommendation. If you delete the previews cache, then Lightroom does indeed only create new ones for those images that are visible in the grid. That is as designed. It's normally not a problem, because as soon as you see an image appear in the grid, its preview will be build. If you want to rebuild all previews anyway, then select all images and choose 'Library - Previews - Build Standard-sized Previews'.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga
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