Lightroom CC Smart Preview Storage Location

[andrew.o.jones]

Hi,

I've been hunting around for info on how to change the local hard disc location that Lightroom CC uses to store items such as previews and Smart Previews. I can find the setting under preferences to set where originals are stored, but not previews. I'm sure I'm not the only user with a small SSD C: drive who wants to store previews on a separate drive, but this doesn't look possible?

Any help or suggestions very much appreciated.

Thanks

Andy

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

That's not possible, I'm afraid. The best you can do currently is use the controls on the Local Storage tab to minimise the impact on your drive. The downside of that is that you might experience some slower loading of images if the smart preview and original has to be downloaded from the cloud.

[andrew.o.jones]

Thanks Jim. That is a bit disappointing. I actually want to have the local Smart Previews so that I can work with my images when I'm not connected to the internet. To be honest it seems like a bit of an omission not to give the user a choice of where to cache files like this as there is a choice for Originals. Even though Smart Previews are much more space efficient than originals its quite easy to build up several gigabytes of them for a large catalog. Its also kinda irritating to have a USB drive with plenty of space on that could easily host my Smart Previews, but simply not be able to

Would be nice if a future update included the ability to select where these kinds of things are stored.

Thanks again anyway.

Andy

[Jim Wilde]

Unless you've got zero available space on the hard drive, you could download the originals to the USB drive (you can do this on a per album basis now, you don't have to download them all), and keep the local drive space setting really low. I would have thought that should still allow you to work offline, provided you didn't try accessing images that you haven't pre-downloaded. I haven't tried that, but I'll try to setup a test to check when I can get access to a laptop that I can use for testing.

[andrew.o.jones]

Thanks Jim.

I think what you propose should work fine and thanks again for the suggestion. I guess I am fundamentally stuck with two options: Work with the 'non' Smart Previews or download originals to an external device on a case by case basis (or small quantities of Smart Previews on the C: drive). Both of these just seem like compromises that don't need to be made, just because there is no option to save Smart Previews anywhere except the C: drive. I just re-iterate my wish that an update to the program includes this as an option to make life easier and less restrictive in the future.

Andy

[Jim Wilde]

I think I understand why it is restricted in that way, but you're not the first to request more control over location. Suggest you head over to the official feedback site and comment there (you'll probably find there's already a request which you could add your vote to): Lightroom CC | Photoshop Family Customer Community

[andrew.o.jones]

Thanks Jim, I have made a suggestion in the feedback forum to allow user specified smart preview storage locations as I could not find an already existing thread that includes this (but as you say, several threads about controlling locations). Fingers crossed this may get implemented one day.

Andy

[André Farhat]

I just had faced the same conundrum. I had a 170gb smart preview.

So I discarded all the smart preview, and I figure I'll just build them per project, and discard them as I go.

I wish there were different qualities of smart previews too.

[Michael Boreham]

If you are using Lightroom (Cloudy) on a Desktop you can put the Library on an external and a symlink to it on the internal in the default location, ~/Pictures folder. I know this not recommended but I have been doing this for 14 months on my iMac (only 256GB) without problem.

I don't do it on my laptop because it would mean having the external permanently connected. 

A link here https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/move-lrcc-library-to-external-with-symlink-in-pictu...

[cibi86]

What you possibly could do is to create an mkLink to your other drive as described here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/mklink

Havent tried it by myself, but should be worth a try.