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Known Participant
July 13, 2025
Question

LRC displays wrong photo

  • July 13, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 364 views

MacBook Pro M1 internal SSD 1 TB 16 GB Ram Sequoia 15.5 . After an indefinite period of time, it can happen that the new photo is not displayed when scrolling on, but the previous photo is still displayed instead of the new photo. By scrolling back by 2 photos and scrolling forward again to the new photo, then the error is eliminated. What could be the reason for this error?

 

3 replies

Anshul_Saini
Community Manager
Community Manager
July 25, 2025

Hi Ortwin, thanks for sharing these details and for confirming that resetting preferences didn’t resolve the issue, as John suggested.

 

When Lightroom Classic displays the wrong photo while scrolling in the Library Module, it usually indicates a problem with the preview cache or how the previews are being loaded, or it could be a performance issue. This can sometimes happen after a catalog has been used for a long time or if the preview cache gets corrupted.

 

Here are a few steps that often help:

 

1. Rebuild Standard Previews as suggested by dj_paige

Go to the specific folder where you notice the issue, select all photos, and navigate to:

Library > Previews > Build Standard Size Previews.

 

2. Optimize Your Catalog

From the menu, choose File > Optimize Catalog. This can help improve performance and fix some inconsistencies.

 

3. Check GPU Settings

Sometimes GPU acceleration can cause display glitches. Go to Preferences > Performance and try toggling Use Graphics Processor off (or set to Custom and disable image processing). See if that improves behavior.

 

4. Try the steps outlined in this helpx article (https://adobe.ly/41cF9Pj).

 

If the issue persists after these steps, could you please let us know:

  • Does this happen with all folders or just some?

  • Roughly how large is your Catalog?

  • You mentioned a 1 TB internal SSD. Are your Catalog and photos stored locally, externally, or on a network drive?

  • Also, please copy and paste your system info from the Lightroom help menu.

Providing this info will help us investigate further and escalate to the product team if necessary.

 

Thanks for your patience. We’ll work with you to get this resolved!

 

Best,

Anshul Saini

Known Participant
August 4, 2025

@Anshul_Saini 

Thank you very much for your quick response. But before I take any further action, I tried to follow the tips mentioned here. The catalog and some of the photos are stored on the laptop's internal SSD. Since only 30 GB of the 1 TB were free and, according to your tips, 20% should be free, I deleted 250 GB of data. The errors still occurred. Next, I wanted to delete Lightroom Catalog previews.irdata, which took up 192 GB. To be on the safe side, I wanted to make a backup on an external SSD with 850 GB of free storage space beforehand. At around 180 GB, I received an error message saying that there was not enough storage space!?! The external hard drive was full!!! On another attempt, everything was supposedly copied, but Finder showed that only 32 GB of 192 GB had been copied. Renaming it to previews_OLD.irdata did not change anything. Furthermore, despite renaming it, no new previews.irdata was created when LRC was started. I still only have previews_OLD.irdata. What do I need to do so that I can save the 192 GB to an external hard drive so that I can delete it from my laptop? I also tried to look at preview.irdata because I thought it was thumbnail photos and to look at the folder structure, but instead LRC opened. As I said before, before I follow any further advice, I would like to make a backup of previews.irdata.

CMass
Community Manager
Community Manager
August 18, 2025

Hey @Ortwin284191255cpu, 

I'm very sorry for the delay in our response. First, thank you for trying all the suggestions from our community, Legends, and Staff to help fix the issue and for sharing your findings.  

If you're still seeing this issue, could you try creating a new catalog and seeing if the issue persists? If so, please share your system information. You can find it by going to Help > System Info, then copying and pasting it into a text file to attach here. This will help us look into it further.

 
^CM
dj_paige
Legend
July 24, 2025

Are you scrolling in the Library Module or the Develop Module or somewhere else?

Known Participant
July 25, 2025

I am scrolling in the Library Module

dj_paige
Legend
July 25, 2025

Try rebuilding the previews. Go to a specific folder in your LrC catalog, then select all photos in that folder in LrC, then Library->Build Standard Size Previews. Do things work better after doing this?

johnrellis
Legend
July 13, 2025

First, restart your computer. If the problem persists, try resetting LR's preferences:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/articles-page/how-do-i-reset-lightrooms-preferences/

LR sometimes soils its preferences file, and resetting it can fix all sorts of wonky behavior. That article explains how to restore the old preferences if resetting doesn't help.

Known Participant
July 24, 2025

@johnrellis unfortunately this did not solve the problem