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It takes time for Lightroom to build them, and even though they are small, they do take up hard drive space.īut if you’re away from home and don’t want to take the hard drive containing the original Raw files with you, then you can build Smart Previews for the photos that you might need. If you only ever edit your photos at home, and you always have the hard drive containing your Raw files to hand, there may be no need to build Smart Previews. It’s just smaller, as the file has been resized to 2560 pixels along the longest edge. When I look at a Smart Preview at 100% enlargement in Lightroom, it looks just as good to my eye as the original file. The Smart Previews file is only a little over 2% the size of the Raw files. The size of the Smart Previews file is only 9.1Mb. I exported the original Raw files contained this small Catalog (16 in total) and the total file size was 430Mb. lrdata file contains previews, and the other Smart Previews. There are three files in this folder, all relating to a Catalog containing 16 files that I exported to test Smart Previews.
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lrdata previews and Smart Previews files. Here’s the folder showing the Catalog file and the accompanying. lrdata files are saved in the same folder as the Catalog (which should be on your computer’s internal hard drive).
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lrdata file type is also used to store the previews that Lightroom makes so it can display thumbnails and full-size previews of the photos displayed in the Catalog in the Library module (Minimal, Standard and 1:1 previews).īoth. It is saved, along with all other Smart Previews belonging to the same Catalog, in an. It is a compressed, lossy DNG file that has been resized so the longest edge measures 2560 pixels. What is a Smart Preview?Ī Smart Preview is copy of a photo file. In Lightroom 5 Adobe introduced a new feature called Smart Previews that solves this problem. Or you might leave external drives at home so you travel with fewer items. You may prefer not to take a hard drive containing photo files with you in case it gets lost or stolen. This is unlikely to be a problem if you do all your photo processing at home. If you store your photos on an external hard drive, and it isn’t connected, you can’t process them. Without Smart Previews, you can only process photos in Lightroom Classic’s Develop module if the hard drive containing your photo files is connected to your computer.
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