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shayb68441784
Inspiring
February 12, 2025
Question

Lightroom Export why building Standard Previews?

  • February 12, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 535 views

I notice after exporting a large batch or images, Lightroom is busy "building standard previews". And that slows thing down to some extent. How can I stop this auto preview buiding in standard while exporting? I don't need standard previews and want to move on with my tasks as quickly as possible.  To speed up my workflow I usually only import with "embedded and sidecar" previews. But there are no choices for previews upon exporting. 

1 reply

Per Berntsen
Community Expert
Per BerntsenCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 12, 2025

Do you have Add to This Catalog checked in the Export dialog?

If you do, the exported images will be imported in LrC, and previews will be built for them.

 

    S
    shayb68441784Author
    Inspiring
    February 19, 2025

    Yes, "add to catalog" is checked, but I don't want or need standard previews built, hence my complaint. If we get preview choices when we import, why not in this case? I would argue that there's much less reason for "standard" previews upon export, as the photos have already been viewed and edited.

    S
    shayb68441784Author
    Inspiring
    February 20, 2025

    Every non-raw image in the library will get standard previews built. It is necessary to be able to display them. For raw images you can select to import using built-in previews since they actually have built-in jpeg previews but that can't be done here when importing jpegs since they don't have built-in previews. So you either make a copy of the actual jpeg into the preview database which doubles the storage requirement or you generate a standard preview.

     

    Also, why import exported images? There is usually no point. If you need these images again sometime in the future, just export from the originals instead. 


    Ok, that makes sense, thank you. To answer your question "why import exported images?", I will quote from Adobe, "Lightroom Classic on your computer offers a rich set of tools for organizing your photos. Collections, keywords, face recognition, flags, stars, color labels, and a variety of useful search filters give you multiple ways to keep track of all the photos on your local drives.". Lightroom at its core is a great organizational tool. But it can't keep track of images that aren't imported into the catalog.

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