Smart Previews Not Loading

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
November 19, 2022
4 replies
10773 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.

D

DaBrownCOAuthor

Inspiring

@Jao vdL AFAIK the 'online only' setting in Dropbox is not the default. At least it isn't on my machine. I have to turn this on myself for individual files or for folders. But everything else is indeed as you say and explains the problem the OP has.

Dropbox issued a statement about this problem just before MacOS Monterey was released and hasn't fixed it until now. The reason that this takes so long is that it isn't a simple bug. Dropbox uses an API that Apple depreciated in MacOS Monterey and later, so they have to rebuild this feature from scratch using alternative API's. I understand there is a beta Dropbox app that does fix it, but that too isn't so easy. The solution was to move the Dropbox folder to an obscure place where the real Apple iCloud folder is also located, and have a link that creates a virtual disk like Apple iCloud also does. That means a lot of relinking missing folders in Lightroom Classic if you stored your images in Dropbox...

P.S. It looks like the update was just released, but it could also still be the beta:

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Apps-and-Installations/After-today-s-upgrade-30-Nov-22-I-cannot-locate-my-Dropbox/td-p/640448

My own version of Dropbox has not updated itself yet.

I've been running Monterey for quite some time and while, of course, I would get the Exclamation icon indicating file was lost, I still had the Smart Preview and could go through my images. I'm not sure if the latest Lightroom update caused the problem or not, but I'm skeptical about that. I'm sort of at a loss. I'm going to try making the files off-line, recreate Smart Previews, and take off-line to see what happens. I'm also wondering if my issue might be a Dropbox sync issue.

Anyhow, I really appreciate the help. I'll get back with any progress.

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.