Changing the location where Ligthroom Classic stores the Previews folder

[RandomPhotographer]

I want my catalog in the Dropbox folder, and my previews outside the Dropbox folder. Since the previews can be regenerated, there is no need to have them in Dropbox.

Is this possible ? Is there a way to store the previews folder (e.g. Lightroom Catalog-v10 Previews.lrdata) in a different directory than the catalog file (e.g. Lightroom Catalog-v10.lrcat) ?

Thanks !

[DdeGannes]

As far as I am aware the previews must reside in the same folder as the Catalog file. The preview file are Catalog specific.

[dj_paige]

You can look up Symbolic Link, which will allow the previews to be elsewhere, but there can be a loss of performance when you do this.

[RandomPhotographer]

I tried your suggestion and set up a symbolic link using

mklink "Lightroom Catalog-v10 Previews.lrdata" "E:Lightroom Catalog-v10 Previews.lrdata"

mklink /D "Lightroom Catalog-v10 Previews.lrdata" "E:Lightroom Catalog-v10 Previews.lrdata"

Unfortunately both ways of setting up the symbolic link resulted in the same message below when I start Lightroom Classic, once, twice, ...

Somehow, the symbolic link is not transparent to LR Classic !?

[JohanElzenga]

Lightroom Classic does follow symbolic links, or at least it did. I am not a Windows expert (I use Mac) but I'm pretty sure the target in your link command is not correct. You missed the backslash in the target path, so your link points at something that does not exist. See: https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/

[JohanElzenga · Accepted solution]

I think this should be the correct command:

mklink /D "Lightroom Catalog-v10 Previews.lrdata" "E:\Lightroom Catalog-v10 Previews.lrdata"

[RandomPhotographer]

Thank you Johan and DJ. I added the missing \ and it now works like a charm !