Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews

I am running LR3.3.
I am doing some housecleaning, and I've found this folder: C:\Documents and Settings\My Name\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata\
It looks like something that was abandoned during an upgrade, and thus it's a candidate for the trash bin. Any thoughts?

Lr 3 creates a copy of the original when you upgraded from an earlier version (i.e Lr1 or Lr2 to Lr3). Therefore, if you can locate a copy for Lr3 then yes it is redundant and can be deleted. The new file may not be labelled Lr3 but the date stamp should still give you a clue as to which is the most recent. That being said, a new copy will be created upon relaunch should you delete the wrong version. Basically, trashing the lrdata file simply means that Lr will need to rebuild a new copy.

Similar Messages

Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata?

I am running into space problems on my C drive (hard to imagine, but I my computer was configured before LR and iTunes). I have moved the iTunes music to another drive, but still need to free up space. LR is using over 3GB in the following location:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata
Under it are folders 0 through 9 and A through F (plus a file called thumbnail-cache.db). These in turn have their own subfolders. Can I remove the whole C:\Documents and Settings\DandJ\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata structure? Do I need to change a preference to have this preview stuff go to a different drive in the future? My 'Camera Raw Cache Settings' is now pointing to a different drive, but this doesn't seem to be the same thing.
I would LOVE to have that 3GB+ free for other things (like defragging without having to move stuff back and forth)!
Thanks.

You can move your Lightroom catalogue and the previews to a different drive. The previews always must be in the same folder that the catalogue lives in. After you move them, simply double-click on the moved catalogue file to open it, and away you go.
Hal

Whatever happened to previews.db in Lightroom 5 Catalog Previews.lrdata?

In earlier versions of Lightroom, there used to be a file called previews.db inside a directory called "Lightroom 5 Catalog Previews.lrdata" , but in Lightroom 5.7, I see that "Lightroom 5 Catalog Previews.lrdata" has become a file (no longer a directory) and there is no previews.db. I had a plugin that needed to read previews.db in order to generate thumbnails. Now I don't know what to do. (Rob Cole, you wrote the function that did this, and it worked great while there was a previews.db -- perhaps you know what is up.) If anyone can point me to where a file similar to previews.db can be found (it has to be parseable by sqlite), that would be very helpful. Thanks!

I don't use a Mac, so cannot answer definitively, but perhaps this folder was compressed either via selecting some option on the folder, itself, or by running some maintenance function that automatically compressed folders that were deemed as wasting space. I would think you'd want this to be an compressed folder so as not to use up an inorfinate amount of time to work with the previews contained inside. Can you make an uncompressed copy and then rename the compressed original as something else and rename the copy to the correct folder name?
Here is some info on compressed folders on Macs I found by Googling:
OS X Mavericks: Compress and uncompress files and folders

Where Does Lightroom Store Catalogs, Previews, and Backups?

1. By default, where does LR store:
a. Catalogs (.lrcat)
b. Previews (.lrdata)
c. Backups of Catalogs and Previews
2. Can these locations be changed?
2a. If so, how does one specify where LR will store each of the above?
3. Is there a specific relationship of location the Catalog, the Preview, and the Backups, or any partial combination of those three, must remain in?
3a. If so, what is/are that/those relationships?

a) By default in the Lightroom folder within My Pictures / Pictures
b) Always in the same folder as the catalogue
c) Wherever you tell it - which should be somewhere different. No backup of Previews.
Re 2, just move the catalogue in Explorer / Finder, double click it. If you didn't move the Previews, LR starts a new one in the same folder as the catalogue, following (b) above.
Re 3, answered above. Backups can / should be elsewhere and it's your choice where.
Notice that in Catalog Settings there's a Show button that reveals where your catalogue is.

Is there any benefit for me to use smart previews if my Lightroom 5 catalog, previews and media are all on the same external USB HD?

I keep everything on 1 External USB3 HD so that I can pug it into my Mac at home or my PC at work and just keep working without syncing anything to the local machine. So is there any benefit with Smart Previews in this case? I heard somewhere that it might make the Develop module a little quicker, but is this only when using the Smart Preview and not the full res image?

Lr uses smart previews instead of ACR cache for initial develop-module view when photos are online - amount of benefit is, in my experience, very minor (not noticeable without using a stop-watch..).
But if photos are offline, you may experience more substantial savings.
Note: smart previews are reduced resolution - smart previews of raw files are 2560 x (say) 1920, so if your original raws were say 5120 x 3840, then you/Lr are dealing with 1/4 the number of pixels when editing via smart previews.
Anyway, if you are willing to give up zoom for one edit pass, you can resize the smart previews so 1:1 fits in your allotted display space (e.g. 1280 x 960, which would be 1/8 number of pixels..), e.g. using the PreviewExporter plugin - then things may be significantly faster in develop module. PreviewExporter also has a feature to take originals offline, and put them back online.
To be clear: the amount of savings may or may not be dramatic - how much there is depends on your system, size of raw vs. smart preview image, number and type of edits applied, etc..
Why don't you try it and tell us what you think?!
Cheers,
Rob

Running LR3.3 - can I delete catalog previews from older versions?

I've got three folders on my HD with names like Lightroom 2 catalog previews.lrdata, Lightroom 3 Catalog Previews -2.lrdata and Lightroom 3 Catalog Previews -3.lrdata ... are all three necessary or can I delete the first two (I'm assuming that Lightroom 3 Catalog Previews -2.lrdata is from the version previous to 3.3)? Just trying to determine what's actually necessary to back up since my external drive's running out of space

You can delete any of the previews folders you like with the understanding that LR will rebuild previews, again, for folders you visit in LR, which is less likely for older versions.
You might also check your back folders and thin out (delete in Explorer/Finder) the older periodic backups to one each month or quarter or year instead of one each week the older they are.

Catalog Preview copy folders?

All,
Quick question. I have two folders in the Lightroom subfolder of the Pictures folder on my Macbook Pro. They are:
Lightroom 3 Catalog Previews.copy.1680lrdata
Lightroom 3 Catalog Previews.copy.1440lrdata
as well as the standard Lightroom 3 Catalog Previews.lrdata
Are those two copy files needed? Not sure how I might have created them. Thanks.
Jay S.

Ian Lyons wrote:
The folders are 100% not of Lr's making. On Mac platform Lr creates a package (lrdata) containing 2 files and 16 top levels folders (1,2,3,.....D,E,F). Each of these folders will contain multiple folder, and within these you will find the actual preview pyramid file for each image. If the image has a VC associated with it will be located beside the master. Each pyramid preview for a real file or VC contains multiple JPEG previews of various sizes (1024, 1400, 1680, 2048...). You need a special application to open the preview file as it is not a conventional JPEG (i.e. drop the preview file onto an app called File Juicer and it will extract all of the embedded previews).
http://echoone.com/filejuicer/
Ian,
Thanks for the link.. I'll look it up.. O.K., so the gaunlet is down. LOL .. I'm positive I didn't create those.. Again, when I was switching within the LR prefernces to different sizes for testing performance on rendering (1440 or 1680) that was the only place I was doing something. If not out of LR, I'm not sure where. It's odd that the two folder mirror the two sizes (by name) I was playing around with. I'm not at my Mac now so I can't test anything. They almost seem like programmed names though.
Again thanks for the filejuicer link.
Jay S.

Installing Lightroom 5 for first time. Chose standard previews of the 100,000+ photos on removable hard drive. Lightroom stopped creating previews after the first 10,000 or so pictures. Don't see how to start it moving forward again. Thanks!

I think I did everything correctly. Moved pictures to the external drive as per Microsoft's instructions for Windows 8. All worked fine. Everything else in Lightroom seems to work fine. However, it just stopped creating standard size previews.

Glad you had success. You can check to see how many preview files have been built by checking the Lightroom 5 Catalog Previews.lrdata folder with File Explorer:
/Users/[user name]/Pictures/Lightroom/Lightroom 5 Catalog Previews.lrdata
Right-click on the folder and select 'Properties.' Next to 'Contains' will be the file count representing the number of built previews. It should be the same as the number of pictures (100,000) or slightly more.
Creating previews for 100,000 image files will take a long time! My Windows 7 i7-860 processor system with 21 mp Canon 5D MKII raw files takes about 3 seconds to build one standard preview. Using this number for 100,000 previews:
100,000 x 3 seconds = 300,000 sec. = 5,000 min. = 83 hours = 3.5 days!

Lightroom catalog/preview multiple folder merging

I have had Lightroom since version 2, have upgraded all along and now have Version 4.2. I noticed as I ugradeed to Version 3, the catalog was still named Lightroom 2 catalog-2. Somehow, along the way, this is now Lightroom 2 Catalog -2-2. This is the catalog Lightroom defaults to. With Lightroom 4 I decided to rename these to: Mark's Lightroom 4 catalog and Mark's Lightroom 4 previews. Well, all I suceeded in doing is I now have 5 folders.
Lightroom 2 Catalog-2Previews.lrdata with 21.1GB
Lightroom 2 Catalog-2-2 Previews.lrdata with 1.6GB
Lightroom settings with169KB
Mark's Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat with 34.6GB
Mark's Lightroom 4 Previews.lrdata with 4.78GB
I also have these two folders with the square Lightroom icon:
Lightroom 2 Catalog-2.lrcat 1GB
Lightroom 2 Catalog-2-2.lrcat 1.01GB
There is also the Backup folder and tempary import and temporary import journal folders within the Lightroom folder.
Windows 7 Ultimate, i7 quad core, new SSD c drive and new 3T Barracuda d drive.
I do back up my d drive on an external hard drive and have put this Lightroom folder on a separate hard drive.
Now, how do I merge those 5 folders into one l catalog and 1 previews folders with messing up.
I have searched the website and watched Julianne Kost's video on merging but am needing a little more specific guidance to not mess this up!
Thanks for any help you can give.

It seems to me that you do not see the file endings since you say "I presume these are catalogs".
The catalog is a file, not a folder, and - on Windows - does not have a yellow folder icon - although it can be (and usually is) within a folder. Open the folder - what do you see then?
The previews on the other hand are in a folder.
If you don't see the file endings go >My Computer >the drive where the catalog is on, select >Tools >Folder Options >View tab.
Make sure that the box that reads "Hide extensions for known file types" is not checked. If it is checked you won't see the file ending < .lrcat> because it will be hidden.
BTW that's on Windows but there must be something similar on Mac.
RE: Previews folders: You just merge the catalogs. You don't have to do anything with the previews.
I would suggest that you merge all of the catalogs you can find.You might have created the 1 GB catalogs inadvertyently.
You could check though by going >File >Catalog, then navigate to the 1 GB catalog and click on it. Lr will open with it (afterclosing down the present catalog) and you'll see what it contains.
If Lr cannot open it then there's not much you can do about. The catalog might be corrupt.
Here's the address for Lr Help that shows you all the options available in <Import from Another Catalog:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/lightroom/using/WS9616DD60-0C3A-484b-8413-053347F21456.html

Very Large Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata File

My Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata file is very large, about 12GB; Is this because of my preview settings? I only have about 10,000 photos in my Lightroom catalog and I'm concerned as to how large this file will get as my catalog grows.

I have 129,980 in my lightroom catalog. The photos go back to January 2000 and are only about 350GB but this previews file is over 116GB. This seems excessive.
Is the alternative to simply take a moment to build previews when I go to a folder? Most of my folders are pretty small.

How does installation of CC Photoshop and Lightroom affect my current catalogs, previews, and caches?

I am going to subscribe to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan. How can I preserve (import?) and use my current catalogs, previews, and caches from my current installation of Lightroom? Or will I have to start over once the new version of Lightroom CC is installed?

If you are currently using Lightroom 5 then switching over to the creative cloud is really simple. There are some who say that it isn't necessary to switch to Lightroom downloaded from the creative cloud. But I did. I'm using Windows, so I used the standard uninstall process to uninstall my standalone Lightroom. Then I installed Lightroom from the creative cloud. After the installation was complete there was an icon for Lightroom (just like the previous one because it is the same program) on my desktop. I double clicked on the icon and Lightroom opened the same catalog that I had been using and everything that I had done previously was still in place. You see, the catalog and previews and all those other files are user files generated by Lightroom on your computer. But they aren't part of the Lightroom program. So removing the Lightroom program does nothing to your catalog or previews or preview cache. It's the same program precisely. It's just licensed differently.
If you have been using Lightroom 4 then Lightroom 5 will find the catalog you have been using and will prompt you to allow it to create an updated copy of it that conforms to the new database format. It's no different than upgrading the standalone version. So the short answer is that you shouldn't lose any of your work by switching over.

How can I edit lightroom 5 smart previews on mac book pro (mbp) when the lightroom 5 master image files are on my external hard drive is disconnected from the mbp

How can I edit lightroom 5 smart previews on mac book pro (mbp) when the lightroom 5 master image files are on my external hard drive is disconnected from the mbp? So far when I try to disconnect the external HD from the mbp, I get the following pop up window: The disk "external hard drive A" couldn't be ejected because "Lightroom" is using it. Quit that application and try to eject this disk again. When I do that and restart Lightroom 5, the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - Select Catalog screen pops up but doesn't list my external hard drive A as a choice.
I've reviewed Adobe's Lightroom Help | Smart Previews Lightroom 5 web page and still haven't been able to figure what I'm doing wrong. Any help would be appreciated.

Your internal HDD. by default, is named 'Macintosh HD'. From what information you supplied, it looks like there is already a Lightroom catalog installed on you local (internal) HDD using the standard naming convention Adobe uses as well as a Lightroom catalog on your external drive which you created. To be sure of which catalog Lightroom is loading when it starts up, To do this, start Lightroom as you normally would. After it starts, select the Lightroom menu item, then select the Catalog Preferences item and finally, navigate to the General tab. The Location information will tell you exactly what catalog Lightroom is opening by default. This will likely be the Photography Mac Book Pro Versions catalog on your external HDD. Once that is confirmed, you are ready to proceed. As an additional test/verification, you can shut down Lightroom and, this time, start Lightroom while holding down the ALT/OPTION key. This will cause Lightroom to pause and display a screen which will allow you to chose a different catalog to open. Navigate to the /Users/[user name]/Pictures/Lightroom folder and select the Lightroom 5 Catalog.lrcat file. When Lightroom comes up, there should be no previews or folders as this catalog should be empty. Now you can be certain which catalog is being used and which catalog has all your data and you are ready to migrate your current catalog. Shut down Lightroom.
To migrate your current catalog, use Finder to locate your Photography Mac Book Pro Versions folder on your external drive. Select the folder and select COPY from the context menu. Next, use Finder to navigate to the /Users/[user name]/Pictures/Lightroom folder on you internal HDD. You can start at the Macintosh HD level and work your way down by opening each level (Macintosh HD/Users/[user name]/Pictures). Select the /Pictures folder and then select PASTE... from the context menu. When the COPY/PASTE is complete, you should see the following files on the Macintosh HD:
Macintosh HD/Users/[user name]/Pictures/Lightroom/ and
Macintosh HD/Users/[user name]/Pictures/Photography Mac Book Pro Versions
The Macintosh HD/Users/[user name]/Pictures/Lightroom folder will contain the empty default catalog the Adobe created when Lightroom was installed and Macintosh HD/Users/[user name]/Pictures/Photography Mac Book Pro Versions will contain a copy of the catalog you created on your external HDD.
You are almost done now. Make sure your external drive is still attached for this step. Restart Lightroom using the ALT/OPTION key again. When the Select Catalog screen appears, select the Choose a Different Catalog button (lower left side). When you do, a Finder window will open to allow you to navigate to a catalog of your choosing. Navigate to Macintosh HD/Users/[user name]/Pictures/Photography Mac Book Pro Versions and select the file Photography Mac Book Pro Version.lrcat. This is the copy you just created. Select the Open button and Lightroom should start. You should see all of your previews and settings just as before. Also, in the left hand panel, all of your folder should show up and none of them should be dimmed and none of your previews should display a small exclamation point badge. Either a dimmed folder name or an exclamation point badge indicates that Lightroom can't find the associated image file. If everything looks good, go to the Lightroom menu, select Preferences and then select the General tab. Under Default Catalog, select an option to either load the LAST catalog opened or select the Users/[user name]/Pictures/Photography Mac Book Pro Versions catalog from the drop down. Shut down Lightroom and then restart it normally. This time, when Lightroom starts, you should be viewing the new copy of your catalog. You can confirm this by looking at the General tab on the Catalog Preferences screen (Lightroom/Catalog Preferences menu items). Shut down Lightroom once again and this time, eject your external drive before restarting. This time, your folders in the left hand panel will be dimmed but you should be able to work with your smart previews. If Lightroom should display a Select Catalog screen with the external drive detached, double check your settings as it indicates Lightroom is still looking at the copy of the catalog on the external drive rather than the new copy you made.
Finally, if you are seeing dimmed folders and/or exclamation point badges with the external drive attached, this indicates a problem. You can select any folder and select Update Folder Location from the context menu. This will allow you to navigate to the copy on the external drive and select it. Lightroom will then update the catalog (select to synchronize the content). This will not only clear the dimmed folder problem but also remove the exclamation point badges for all photos in that missing folder. However, it may indicate that not all went well with the copy of the catalog so make sure to verify all went well. You can use the Get Info option on the two folders. You should see the same number of files/folders for both the copy on the internal drive as well as on the external drive but you can't rely on the byte count because of the possibility of differences between the geometry of the two drives. Hope this all helps!

Lightroom 3 crash after upgrading Lightroom 1 Catalog

I installed Lightroom 3 and upgraded my Lightroom 1 catalog (21,000 photos). It runs through the upgrade process without any problems and opens Lightroom 3, where I can browse through a few screens of images.
However, if I scroll past a certain point in my Grid view, Lightroom 3 stops rendering thumbnails. Double clicking on images fails to render a preview. CPU usage at this point goes from 50% to 0. At this point, Lightroom 3 becomes useless, though I can still scroll up and down, I only see empty grid thumbnail frames.
If I quit the application, I get a beachball, for minutes on end before I force quit.
Console reports the following:
06/10/10 9:53:24 PM Adobe Lightroom 3[506] ServerProcess [AsyncDataServer( Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat )] ERROR SERVER<AsyncDataServer
( Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat )>: A command threw an exception.
06/10/10 9:53:24 PM Adobe Lightroom 3[506] ServerProcess [AsyncDataServer( Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat )] ERROR Error: ?:0: attempt to
perform arithmetic on field '?' (a nil value)
06/10/10 9:53:24 PM Adobe Lightroom 3[506] Error initializing alternate universe. bad argument #1 to 'pairs' (table expected, got nil)
Deleting all Lightroom 3 prefs, plists, catalog, previews, rebooting and trying the process again results in exactly the same problem.
I can still run Lightroom 1 fine. It has no problem with the Lightroom 1 catalog. I tried optimizing the Lightroom 1 catalog before upgrading, but this
did nothing.
I'm running on a 2007 MacBookPro with 3GB RAM and a 7200 RPM 500GB drive under Mac OS X 10.5.8.

The problem lies in 1 or more "corrupt" catalog entries from the old catalog. I had exactly the same problem going from LR2 to LR3 on a 2009 iMac running 10.6.4. I got the same console error messages and had exactly the same symptoms.
However I discovered that I could start LR3 with a new empty library and then use "import from catalog" to selectively import some parts from my LR2 catalog. There are about 6k images in the LR2 catalog and some folders would work fine and others would fail. After a lot of trial and error I was able to isolate where LR3 would hang and give me problems. And the images that it had a problem with were 2 images from the old catalog that LR2 would not display. Instead LR2 would show a blank thumbnail where the "corrupt" catalog thumbnail should be and would not be able to display that image. For those images, LR2 gave the following console error message:
10-07-01 8:58:48 AM Adobe Lightroom 2[2038] *** WARNING: Method selectRow:byExtendingSelection: in class AgNSOutlineView is deprecated. It will be removed in a future release and should no longer be used.
10-07-01 9:02:04 AM Adobe Lightroom 2[2038] ?:0: attempt to perform arithmetic on field '?' (a nil value)
Aside from not display the thumbnails and images for those two files, LR2 worked fine. When I unselected those two images from the "import from catalog" dialog, I was able to import the rest of my LR2 catalog into LR3 in one shot.
If LR1 fails to display some thumbnails, you could manually note which those are and then use the same process I used. It is still tedious going through a large library looking for blank thumbnails. If LR1 displays all thumbnails correctly then you could try the brute force trial and error approach that I initially used but that is very time consuming.
Hope this helps.

Catalog Previews.lrdata folders

I see that in the previews.lrdata folder, there are several folders, each containing about a thousands empty folders. What are all of these folders? Are they really empty, or is it stuff that Windows just will not show. I have "show hidden folders" turned on.

Those folders are where Lightroom keeps it previews. It generates the previews when you import photos or later e.g when you go to Develop;
Are the folders empty? That probably means that they contained full-sized previews that now are empty because the full-sized previews were discarded (as chosen by you on the "File Handling" tab of the Catalog Settings Window.)
If these folders really are empty, then you could delete them, if you are worried about clutter.
I know that Lr will regenerate any missing folders in the previews.lrdata folder, whether it reuses empty ones I do not know.
Even if you delete the complete .lrdata folder Lr will regenerate, but it can take a long time for a large number of images.

Rescue my photos from a lightroom 5 catalog! PLEASE!!!

Okay, I have read every help thread and web page, and nobody seems to have advice for my specific problem. I am praying for the sake of my whole summer's worth of work that someone here can help me.
I used Lightroom 5 on a Windows 8 laptop this summer and had a catalog of about 5000 photos, most of which I did not have extra copies of anywhere. This was not intentional, but when I plugged my sd card into my laptop, lightroom would import the photos and I assumed it was also placing a hard copy in a folder somewhere. I am a moron. Anyway.
That laptop partially MELTED, and a friend managed to back up my hard drive to my external, which was obviously formatted for a PC. Here is where it gets tricky.
Another friend lent me her old laptop, which can't use lightroom 5. I installed lightroom 4, but found I could not open or access my old catalog. All of those partially-edited photos that I hadn't exported yet are trapped in there. I am a student. I worked hard on those photos. Dozens of shoots this summer with models and makeup artists are rendered worthless if I cannot get those photos.
My friend lent me his computer, which I am on right now. It's a newer mac and has Lightroom 5. BUT it won't open my catalog from my hard drive because of some formatting issue. So. I copied the catalog and the previews catalog (trying to follow How to Recover Images from Lightroom Previews ) to the desktop, but that method is not working. I've tried everything. I am having a full emotional breakdown. This work means SO much to me and if it's lost I have let SO many people down and I am BEGGING someone, anyone, to help me find a solution. 5000 photos I may never get back. It's unbelievable. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HELP.

The Lightroom (LR) catalog does not contain your image files. When piictures are imported LR moves a copy of the image files from the camera memory card to a folder location on your hard drive. If you do not specify a folder location they will be copied to the default Windows 8 'My Pictures' folder. That is where you will find your image files! The LR Catalog contains your LR Develop module editing settings for image file and any metadata tags you may have added.
Your LR 5 catalog will not open using LR 4 because it is an older version that does not support the new features. A Mac system will not be able to open the catalog with LR 5 since the external drive is probably NTFS formatted. You can however "read" the files on the external drive using Mac Finder. Check it and see if you can find your camera image files, which are probably in the 'Pictures' folder.
justhelpmegetmyphotos wrote:
That laptop partially MELTED, and a friend managed to back up my hard drive to my external, which was obviously formatted for a PC. Here is where it gets tricky.
What do you mean by "melted?" Please explain the symptoms, what actually failed, and how the hard drive was copied over to the external drive.
As dj_paige has mentioned you should make regular backup copies of your LR catalog to an external hard drive. You also need to backup all of your imported image files in the 'My Pictures' folder or wherever you have stored them! I also suggest reading LR tutorials to get a better understanding of how "non-destructive" editing works with your image files. Here's a good place to start:
http://tv.adobe.com/show/getting-started-with-adobe-photoshop-lightroom-5/
Read 'Importing Your Images' first and continue from there as needed.

Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for