Lightroom Previews.lrdata Just keeps...

How can you delete +20000 previews and not get any more free space on the drive ???



To put it a different way, how to you kill that 4 gb preview folder?
Lightroom Previews.lrdata Just keeps...
Using Windows??



Just delete it - simple. LR will rebuild previews as and when required. Something else you might want to consider: in the Library drop down menu %26gt; Reviews %26gt; Discard 1:1 previews - again LR will rebuild 1:1 previews as and when required.
Lightroom Previews.lrdata Just keeps...
thanks .. I tried the Discard option, but as I said in the first mail after 20.000 previews was deleted, the folder had excactly the same size on the disk ??

Which folder was exactly the same size - I don't understand? If you deleted the entire folder there would no longer be a folder to check the size of if you get my meaning?

as I said .. I used the ''DISCARD'' option from within lightroom, so no folders was deleted, but LR reported that 20.000+ previews had been deleted!

and when I checked the free space on the drive it was excactly as before I ran the discard previews function from within LR ..



but I have now manually deleted the folders, and now I have +20GB of free space, and no more fullsize previews, and LR runs a LOT faster... so I guess I just have to delete that folder by hand once in a while!



thanks!

Glad you got it sorted :-)

I just had this problem too, so I'm wondering is this a bug? If not, what is the point of the 'Discard Previews' command if it doesn't actually delete them from the disk? BTW, I'm on Windows, don't know if this happens on Macs too.

MCV

Of course this isn't the solution. I have exactly the same problem: discard 1:1 previews doesn't decrease used diskspace at all. When I had just one album imported in my LR, it did decrease from 30MB to close-to-nothing. But, as there are now 1500 photographs in LR, it stays locked at about 512 MB. Funny part is, it was 512 MB with 800 photos as well. There seems to be something wrong here. Hope it will be solved in a future update.

BTW, I'm on OSX 10.4

Well, I'll hazard a guess why this happens. The previews are in the database files inder Lightroom Previews.lrdata. When you say to discard previews, it does... Inside the database. But the database files will not go away, or get smaller until they are compressed, which lightroom does not do. However, The database file(s) will not get any bigger because there is all this freespace insite to reuse.



So, by deleting the files as you have done, and setting the discard options as you have, the new previews database tables will only get up to a certain size, and then regular automatic discards will start to free up space for new previews as they are needed.



In other words, the previews database will not grow unchecked any more. It will only get as big as it needs to to maintain the Discard rule you set up.



I'm just guessing, but I do DB development for a living.



Steve

Discarding 1:1 previews should shrink the the preview directory immediately. If it doesn't, there's either a bug, or you didn't have any (or many) 1:1 previews.



If the disk space isn't freed right away, that may be a sign they're in the OS somewhere like the trash can and that needs emptying.

I just tested it. It works just fine, and my previews directory shrunk immediately. That was on 1.0 on Windows XP SP2.



Just because it says it discarded them for a zillion images doesn't mean it actually did anything. It means there aren't any anymore for those images, but there may not have been any to start with.

My Lightroom Previews.lrdata has grown steadily to the point that it's now nearly 6GB in size. My catalogue has about 9100 photographs in it. I've done a Discard 1:1 previews but it hasn't decreased the size of the file at all. I'm using LR 1.31 on Max OS X 10.5.2.



I know Lee Jay says a discard shrank his Previews.lrdata, but has anyone tried doing this on a Mac? I.e., is there a bug in the Mac version?



I even tried optimizing the catalogue, but that seemed only to optimise the .lrcat file, not the .lrdata file.

The previews will remain for some time.

If you undo LR will not have to rebuild all previews.

And when LR make new previews it will use the ''place'' of the old removed ones for that.

So even if you don't notice an decrease in size right now聽you will not either notice an increase if you make a whole lot of new previews.

Eventually I think that the previews will be removed聽but how long that will take I do not know.



What you can do is to remove the previews file and rebuild previews.



/Andreas

%26gt; I know Lee Jay says a discard shrank his Previews.lrdata, but has anyone tried doing this on %26gt; a Mac? I.e., is there a bug in the Mac version?



On my MBP running 10.5.2, I created a new catalog, imported 400 photos of various formats. Selected all and rendered 1:1 previews. Watching in Finder I saw the file size of the .lrdata file increase as Lightroom's progress meter advanced. Once it was finished I discarded 1:1 previews for all those files and similarly watched the .lrdata file shrink. Both operations appeared to work as expected. I even repeated it and got the same results.

I think you will lost all thumbnails if you delete the preview folder and your photo is offline.



LR should save the samll thumbnails in some where and we can discard all preview cache to claim back the hard disk space.

Discard 1:1 Previews doesn't work on my machine.



Not only the disk space is not freed, but loading an image with 'discarded preview' at 1:1 zoom level happens almost instantly, accompanied by a ''Loading Preview'', rather than a ''Rendering Larger Preview'' message.



Then, rebuilding 1:1 previews for 'discarded' images also happens instantly, apparently skipping all the files as if the previews are already there.



LR 1.3.1, both on Vista x64 and XP Pro. I remember it worked correctly in some earlier version of LR.

The 'housekeeping' of the LR database seems to be very incomplete. From what I have seen, deleting a photo from the catalog does not delete the previews from the previews folder, regardless of the size of the preview. The database is updated, but the corresponding preview is left behind and orphaned.



Hopefully this will be fixed in V2. Maybe this should become part of the 'Verify database' function. Right now there is no 'delete orphaned previews' function.



Until this is fixed, it seems that the only way to truly cleanup the database is to 'export' the whole catalog to a new catalog, taking the previews with it. This will take only the valid previews. After the new catalog is generated, the old catalog and it's previews can be manually deleted from the drive.

I think you may delete sub dir under \XXX Previews.lrdata

and retain thumbnail-cache.db if you want to clean the preview cache.



actually I like to have standard view cache cleaning function too. it will be good if LR has buttons for preview cache info and cleaning cache now like C1 Pro has.

Shame on LR, my preview-cache is 8 Gb, and it won't shrink, and I'm not even a pro.

Under ''C:\Documents and Settings\%user%\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata\[0..F]'' there are subfolders, where only 1 or 2 files reside, about the size of 2-3 Mbytes.

All I can say in Dilbert style: ''boooo''. Why deleting a simple file is rocket science?

Not to mention that you cannot control where the preview cache is placed for the first time, so it is placed on drive C: on Windows. LR designers must have loved the sound of the HDD, when the operating system and Lightroom tries frantically load data from the same drive.

As Bugs Bunny said, ''Unlax, Doc!''



Put your .lrcat where you want; LR will build a new catalog there. Then delete the old one. In your case your file path is both very long and contains an odd character too; remedy that when you put your catalog where you want.



For those of us with a real history in using LR, ie. many versions, it's not at all surprising to me the Previews folder could get corrupt.



Netuggi- Please post back results if you choose to do what I suggest.

I just discovered something truly bizarre about how LR does its housekeeping with these previews. Maybe someone can expand on this point, and enlighten us as to what the %^$%26amp;# LR is doing...



When you do a ''discard previews'' in LR, the number of previews it will actually discard seems to be a function of how many photos are selected in the current view (folder/keyword/collection, etc). So I selected the parent directory of all of my photos (which is ''My Pictures'' on my PC). It contains just short of 6000 images, and when I did ''discard previews'', it said it would discard some 5400 previews. Great. I did that, it took more than a minute to complete the operation, and I verified that my LR previews database had shrunk from 2.6G to 1.8G.



But here it gets even more weird -- I then went and selected one of the sub-folders with about 1100 photos and repeated. LR again said that it was going to delete several hundred MORE previews. This time, discarding those previews didn't shrink the database at all. I have no idea what this means -- is LR keeping multiple previews for each image? Or is does it only THINK it's deleting the previews the 2nd time when there's actually nothing there to delete????



Ultimately, I understand that just deleting the previews database is the simple approach to this dilemma. But that's an ugly solution by my standards, and being the curious sort, I'd rather know what's going on behind the scenes and what the most elegant way is to handle it.

Perhaps a reading of the Lightroom FAQ titled ''Why is the Lightroom preview folder so big, even after purging the 1:1 previews?'' will clarify the mystery.



For more fun Google ''image pyramid''.

FAQ is at http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b63219

That is informative, but still leaves much mystery remaining. My situation is as follows: Monitor screensize is 1280 x 1024. I have my preview size in Lightroom set to 1024, medium resolution. Roughly 2/3 of the 6000 images in my catalog have a pixel dimension of 3888 x 2592.



Based on these numbers and the information in the referenced post, I'd expect that most of my 1:1 previews are indeed purged when I ''discard 1:1 previews''. Here are some observations of what LR is doing:



- I select every image in the catalog and ''discard 1:1 previews''. LR does this, which takes 1min 45 sec to complete, showing the progress bar the whole time. Afterwards I observe my previews database to shrink from 1.69GB to 1.66GB. Hardly significant.



- I can immediately repeat this operation, with exactly the same result. I.e. it appears that the previews weren't actually discarded.



- I've checked the time delayed purging of the cache mentioned in the post, and I don't see evidence that it's happening on my system.



Ultimately, what I'd really like to know is if there's a reliable way to shrink the size of the preview cache down to a negligible size, without having to manually delete the folders? Curious what percentage of that 1.66GB of cache data is 1:1 previews, and what percentage is other data, or previews of other sizes?



Any insights or additional info appreciated...

%26gt;- I select every image in the catalog and ''discard 1:1 previews''. LR does this, which takes 1min 45 sec to complete, showing the progress bar the whole time. Afterwards I observe my previews database to shrink from 1.69GB to 1.66GB. Hardly significant.



You don't need to select them all, Lr will give you choice at the appropriate time.



For 6000 image your previews databases is tiny, nothing to be concerned about.



%26gt;Ultimately, what I'd really like to know is if there's a reliable way to shrink the size of the preview cache down to a negligible size,



It's as small as it going to get

''You don't need to select them all, Lr will give you choice at the appropriate time.''



Actually, based on what I've seen, that's not correct. In the library module, whatever 'collection' of photos I have selected, whether it's a catalog, folder, collection, with or without filtering based on metadata, attributes, etc -- Lightroom will discard previews from that group of photos only. So... if I want to discard my previews from the whole catalog, then I must select the whole catalog.

Hi,



I have a lightroom database (transferred from 1.3 -%26gt; 2.0 a few days ago) on separate, fast HD with 70000+ images. There is NOTHING else on this partition besides this and other conciderable smaller LR database.



Because this partition is smallish (just around 80 Gb) and there is only 5-6 Gb free space at the moment, I tried to kill previews of 50000+ images on LR. Instead of freeing up space on that partion, the available free space is getting SMALLER (ie LR is taking up more space by the minute!



How can this be?!??!



Any words of wisdom would help at the moment. I麓m getting tired of this resource-hogging. And btw: the FAQ mentioned doesn麓t help. Some of the pics are portrait oriented and I don麓t know if the preview mentioned means horizontal of vertical, or just the longest edge. And also: most of the selected deleted previews from Canon 5D which gives more than twice the resolution of the standard preview size.

Why don't you just locate the Previews folder and simply delete it? LR will rebuild the Preview folder as and when.

And before relaunching to rebuild the Previews, check settings that Previews aren't being built larger than you need them.