Adobe Lightrooom Classic - No Previews

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
August 31, 2023
2 replies
171 views

Hi all,

I cannot view any previes on Lightroom. The problem started over a year ago when I accidently clicked the backup button, and backed up my library to an external hard drive. For whatever reason ever since then the preview screens have been grey.

I have spent hours going throught the support forums trying to recover and resolve this issue to no avail. I have reassigned permissions and reloaded the library after deleting it many times. This is a major issue in my workflow that makes LR difficult to organize a library of fotos. It really harms the overall use of the application.

I am using a PC with Windows 10.

Thanks in advance for any insights and help!

Files and libraries

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JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Sounds like your previews cache may be corrupted. This has nothing to do with making a backup. That the problem started after that must be a coincidence. Try the following: open your Lightroom catalog folder and look for the 'catalogname previews.lrdata' folder. Trash it and then start Lightroom Classic. Initially you will still not see any thumbnails, but then Lightroom should start building them one by one. Do make sure that your originals are online! Lightroom needs them to build the thumbnails.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

A

Adam22691734ybcbAuthor

Participant

Hi Johan,

Thanks for your advice, although I have tried that many times. I did what you suggested and still no previews.

I am not even getting previews on new images I import. It seems to me like LRclassic is not finding the folder for making and accessing the previews.

I wish there was a human employee at Adobe who could provide real customer service. Sometime these forums are no use for specific issues like this one.

@Adobe, what do you think??

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

Are you sure you are opening the correct catalog file? I don't know how this works on windows but you should be able to click (or right or control click) on the title bar on your Lightroom Classic window and locate it. Make sure it is your actual catalog you want to work on and not some backup. Open the enclosing folder where your catalog resides and you should see a bunch of extra files there. One is very large and shoud have "Previews.lrdata" at the end. Quite Classic and then move this file to the bin. Restart Lightroom Classic and it should recreate this file and start generating previews for your images. You can also hit the Library->previews->Build Standard Sized Previews menu option while having a bunch of images selected.

kglad

Community Expert

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