Smart Previews not loading

Forum|Forum|9 months ago
April 21, 2025
1 reply
241 views

On my laptop I have added Smart Previews to all the photos from previous years and removed the originals. They are on a larger external hard drive. This is to save space. This has worked perfectly for years. Now the actual picture does not show up. I can still see the score I gave it, and the collection it is in, and I see all the metadata and if corrections were applied. When I click on it, it says "The folder could not be found." I read

JohanElzenga's post and I removed the Catalog Previews folder, but the pictures did not rebuild. If I click on an individual photo in Smart Previews I can see the picture. It just seems Lightroom does not know where the Smart Preview folder is.

Windows

A

Aleke

Community Manager

Hi @Ron! 😊 I'm sorry to hear you're having issues with your smart previews.

Could you let us know which version of Lightroom Classic you're using? Also, how did you remove the catalog previews folder? Did you delete the [Catalog-name] Previews.lrdata folder within your Lightroom catalog, and also delete the previews.db and root-pixels.db files?

Thanks a bunch!

Alek

*(If you mention me with an @, like @Aleke, I’ll get a notification and can respond faster.)*

R

Ron!Author

Participant

Thanks for healping. I have 6.14. When I first saw I had no smart previews, I had done nothing to cause it that I know of. All the parts of install were still there. In fact, I have since built smart previews on photos I had not yet removed and their Smart previews are still working after I removed the originals by taking them out of the folder they were in using Windows File explorer. After the previous smart previews had disappeared, I followed the suggestion in JohanElzenga's post and I removed the Catalog Previews folder to a different location using File Explorer but the pictures did not rebuild. Putting the Catolog Previews folder back in changes nothing.

Here is a screenshot of what I am seeing. A blank picture of the Smart Preview with all the metadata and a caption below the histogram saying the photo is missing.

How do I get to make Lightroom look at the Smart Preview Folder to find the picture?

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