Smart Previews Not Loading

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
November 19, 2022
4 replies
10761 views

My Smart Previews are not loading when I open a folder in which my originals are stored in an external hard drive that is off-line. In each of two folders I've opened, a handful of Previews load, but that's it.

I appreciate any help you can offer.

David

macOS

J

jay_3534

Participant

Smart Previews may not load fully if Lightroom cannot find all the data it needs. This can happen when the external hard drive with the original files is offline. Even though Smart Previews should work without the originals, some previews might be missing or broken. Try turning on the hard drive once to refresh the previews, then close and reopen Lightroom.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Sounds like your previews cache may be corrupt. Open your catalog folder and move 'catalogname previews.lrdata' out of it. Leave 'catalogname smart previews.lrdata' in place. Start Lightroom and see if this helps. Initially you will see no previews at all, but then Lightroom should start rebuilding the cache so they'll appear one by one.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

D

DaBrownCOAuthor

Inspiring

So just to be clear, even though it's my Smart Previews that aren't loading, I should move the previews.lrdata folder. Thanks.

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

It's not so easy as that as I have my catalog on Dropbox and because they are so large, I can only make about 4 months of images available at a time due to hard drive space. I'll try that though.

>I have my catalog on Dropbox

Ooof! That can be a real problem! I wouldn't be surprised if this is part of the issue. If you do this, you have to make absolutely sure that the files are always actually on the machine. By default, dropbox offloads files not in active use from the local machine and replaces them with a zero-byte file that only will get loaded if you try to access them. This breaks with many applications including Lightroom Classic. So you need to make sure the folder of previews and the catalog are set to be available offline and even then you might need to revisit that quite often as that setting is not sticky if new files (e.g. new previews!) are added to a folder. You can make this work but it is fraught with major pitfalls to put your catalog on a cloud service folder.

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

How sure are you that you actually have smart previews of these images? It should say Original+Smart preview under the histogram when you select the image in Library.