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R
ravidnr
Participant
May 9, 2025
Answered

Premiere Pro Keeps Creating .prin Files – What Are They and Can I Stop It?

  • May 9, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 4678 views

Hi Adobe Community,

I've noticed that Adobe Premiere Pro keeps generating .prin files in my project folders. I'm not entirely sure what these files are for. They seem to appear after saving or sometimes even while I'm just working on a project.

A few questions I have:

  1. What exactly are these .prin files?

  2. Are they necessary for my project workflow?

  3. Is there a way to prevent them from being created, or at least have Premiere clean them up automatically?

I'm using [insert your version of Premiere Pro] on [your operating system], and this has been a consistent issue for me. It's cluttering my project folders, and I want to make sure I'm not doing something wrong.

Thanks in advance for any help or clarification!

Best regards,

    Correct answer Alexander_DVA

    Thank you for your feedback.

    These files are part of the new media intelligence feature which powers the visual search in Premiere Pro. Premiere Pro analyzes all the video data in your project and creates a search database from the visual information. If you then hit the "search" button in the top right of the header bar you are e.g. able to search for complex expressions like "drone shot of a red car in a city"
    The media intelligence settings to enable/disable this feature are available on the import page or through the app preferences.

    See more details about media intelligence here: Adobe Helpx - Premiere Pro Media Intelligence Search

    Hope this helps - and happy searching!

    Best regards,
     Alexander

    2 replies

    Christine Steele
    Christine Steele
    Participating Frequently
    March 26, 2026

    I realize this is an older thread but I think the .prin file stores all kinds of info related to AI features in Premiere. So… even if you delete it, or turn off Media Analysis, this file will get recreated if, for example, you used an AI feature in your Premiere project, such as Scene Edit Detection, or Enhance Sound, or Remix Music, or Auto Reframe to 9x16, etc. I don’t know why anyone would want to NOT use media analysis because it enables the use of the Search panel which is amazing (for me anyway). The .prin file enables faster performance in Premiere, and keeps the Project file itself lighter by storing AI info in a separate sidecar file. If you used any AI features in Pr, then delete that .prin file (or moved the project and don't take the .prin file too) then your performance in Pr will be temporarily slower when you re-open that project...while it rebuilds the .prin data so your enhanced speech or remix track or AI Masking effect works correctly every time without having to use more resources to recreate it the next time your playhead hits it. Hope this helps!

    Keep Creating...
      Alexander_DVA
      Adobe Employee
      Alexander_DVACorrect answer
      Adobe Employee
      May 9, 2025

      Thank you for your feedback.

      These files are part of the new media intelligence feature which powers the visual search in Premiere Pro. Premiere Pro analyzes all the video data in your project and creates a search database from the visual information. If you then hit the "search" button in the top right of the header bar you are e.g. able to search for complex expressions like "drone shot of a red car in a city"
      The media intelligence settings to enable/disable this feature are available on the import page or through the app preferences.

      See more details about media intelligence here: Adobe Helpx - Premiere Pro Media Intelligence Search

      Hope this helps - and happy searching!

      Best regards,
       Alexander

      N
      No Interest
      Participant
      June 11, 2025

      Thanks. How do we automatically save these PRIN files to a separate folder, like audio previews, auto-saves, etc.? 

      R Neil Haugen
      R Neil Haugen
      Legend
      September 10, 2025

      I get that, but adding that data to the project file seems problematic in the way that Warp Stabilizer cache can drastically balloon a project file. I have not yet battle tested the PRIN files so I'll know eventually if I run into the issue of versioning up my Premiere project against a PRIN file, but generally I'm just talking about organization here and user experience. This is an unwanted messy way of working.

       

      Just this afternoon I was tutoring someone who showed me their desktop and holy cow... it was a nightmare of Pr and AE files, folders, JPGs, etc. If you started adding PRIN files to that scary mess...how is the unorganized Premiere user supposed to deal with that? I'm a super conscious organized editor, but not everyone works this way.


      Oh, Lord ... the mess so many people have on their computers! Yowza freaking woa.

       

      But then, just looking across my 8 iternal SSDs, these are past the two Nvme SSD drives, one for OS/programs, the other for all cache files ... the 8 'content' SSDs need some cleanup. I haven't done that really for about year now, and it's time. Never enjoyable but needed as a routine thing.

      Everyone's mileage always varies ...
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