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J
jimchurches
Participant
March 21, 2023
Question

Smart Preview Sync & Storage

  • March 21, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 622 views

Platforms: iPadOS and macOS

Application: Lightroom Photoshop Lightroom 6.2 (i.e. the full cloud version, I don't use classic at all)

 

On wildlife photography trip a few weeks ago I would empty my camera onto my iPad and sync all my photos to the cloud.  At home now I can see all my photos but the previews are low quaility and pixulated when viewed on my Mac.  If I just stay with a photo and wait a minute or two the good quality smart preview seems to load and all is good, no problem at all once loaded.  However, when browsing thousands of photos of birds and other wildlife to cull 95% of photos, having to wait minutes is just totatally unusable.  It is driving me insane.

 

Is this expected behaviour?

 

Is there a way I can 'pre download' or 'pre generate' the smart previews on my Mac and not have to view each photo individually and wait a minute or two for it to download?

 

I thought this could be a bandwidth issue as my ISP has some issues at times, but I have this problem when bandwidth is good and bad.  It is good most of the time, it can be a bit over-subscribed some evenings.

 

Help!  I have thousands of photos to work through and it is impossible to do this at the moment.  The iPad is good for in the field but for reviewing and working on a large volume of photos my Mac is just better.  The previews on the iPad are fine, but I assume this is because the iPad is the original locations where the source files were uploaded.  Photos uploaded from my Mac don't have this problem.

 

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

J
jimchurchesAuthor
Participant
March 21, 2023

After typing the above I had an idea.  I put all the photos that entered the Adobe ecosystem via the iPad from the trip into an album and then marked the album as 'Store Locally' on my Mac.  Those photos are now downloading to the Mac, and will take some time I suspect (that is okay, I'll do something else).  I am guessing that once there is a local copy I can work on them how I want, quickly culling what I don't need.  The interesting thing to find out is (1) will the smart previews now render immeidately (2) after the culling of photos, if I then remove all the remaining photos from the 'local' album will the smart previews remain (I don't really want to have to maintain the album).

 

I will report back ...

Jim Wilde
Community Expert
Jim WildeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 22, 2023

Personally I do the opposite.....I have the Preferences>Local Storage option "Store a copy of all Smart Previews locally" permanently enabled, thus when new images are added a smart preview should be automatically downloaded when using the Lightroom desktop app. Those smart previews are then what Lightroom will initially load when an image is selected, so the initial preview is OK. 

However, you need to understand that whilst that smart preview is OK for some things, Lightroom will always try to download the original (if the system is online) when you try to do certain other things (like zooming to 1:1 or starting to make edit adjustments), and that's probably the delay you are running into. What you doing by storing an album locally should certainly avoid that delay, but at the expense of the local storage space. 

J
jimchurchesAuthor
Participant
March 22, 2023

Thanks Jim - I do have 'Store a copy of all Smart Previews locally' enabled.

 

I might be misunderstanding Smart Previews.  I've always been a landscape and travel focused photographer and didn't drill in to 1:1 or more when working on images that often.  My focus has changed since COVID to wildlife, mostly birds, since travel was curtailed for a few years.  With birds, I'm always looking at detail as I cull so zoom in all the time.  I assumed I was looking at the Smart Preview, but perhaps the problem is as you say - I have to wait for the original to download to look at the fine detail.    I haven't noticed this before because the images were imported from my Mac and so I assume that the original is available in my local cache.  But since I've sync'd via the iPad then I have to wait for the original to download when on my Mac.   I'll keep playing, but I think you may have pointed me in the right direction.  

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