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.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Yup. I know what I need to do. I do have one more question though. My SmartPreviews.lrdata file is date Sept 19, 2020 as Create Date and Date Modified. Would that make a difference? I'm just curious. I am going to set up my External Drive as the source for my pictures and not Dropbox.

No, ignore that. The previews 'file' is not really a file, but a 'package'. That is a folder that looks like a file and can be double clicked like a file to launch an application. The modification date of a package is often not updated when the contents changes. Even the size is often not correctly shown by the MacOS Finder. This is a known issue, but it has no relevance to your problem.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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.