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

SSD drives are also insanely cheap nowadays. Samsung and Sandisk both have a 2 TB one for $150 on amazon. I like the sandisk ones as they are nice and rugged. They are tiny and you can even just velcro them to the back of your laptop screen and keep them plugged in. Just make sure to reformat them to APFS or mac os extended (journaled).

I understand what you are saying, but this has worked for me up until now. I do have an external drive that I do have a back-up of my library on. However, I'd rather not have to carry around this drive all the time. I may have to resort to that though.

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.