Ok, I am just about beside myself. Lightroom constantly gives me the "encountered error reading preview cache" message and then crashing. I know I am not alone in this as I have seen it posted numerous times. Only problem is all of the trouble shooting that worked for everyone else does not work for me.
I have tried deleting the previews file and then I tried the folder. I tried purging the cache. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling lightroom.
It happens in multiple catlogues and across multiple harddrives.
If it is happening repeatedly, you have some sort of hardware problem. Most likely a disk malfunction, or data transmission malfunction. You need to run diagnostics on ALL of your hardware to find possible malfunctions.
If there is no disk damage, the solution is probably to delete the entire preview cache and letting it rebuild. This is done by quitting the program, finding your catalog file and looking for the ...previews.lrdata file next to it with the same root name and moving that somewhere else. When you now restart the program, it will look scary at first since you will only see grey rectangles but the previews should automatically be recreated over time. Depending on the size of your catalog this might take a very long time.
Be careful with putting a catalog on a dropbox, Onedrive, or similar synced folder. This can cause database damage like you observe here. Don't know if you did this but it is one cause of corrupt preview caches.
Purging the Camera RAW CACHE, that would not be it, that CACHE gets purged when you exit Lightroom Classic. And you would have an issue in Develop module.
Reinstalling Lightroom Classic, nope, not a program code issue.
Multiple catalogs, so that implies not a corrupt catalog.
Multiple drives, I will talk to that one next, do not want to conflict above with below (next post)
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