Building Smart Previews in Lightroom

- If you're a Lightroom user, you should already be familiar with Smart Previews. You see a checkbox to build Smart Previews every time you import an image. You can have Lightroom build you Smart Previews for all your images and if you do, you get a number of advantages. As we saw on a previous practicing photographer, with the flip of a certain preference in Lightroom, the presence of Smart Previews can make Lightroom go a little bit faster. It can get large images to the screen faster than it can if it has to kind of churn away without a Smart Preview. Smart Previews are also necessary if you use Lightroom mobile in concert with the desktop version of Lightroom.

Smart Previews are how Lightroom moves images to your mobile device. They are small. They pack a tremendous amount of power because with Smart Previews you can perform the same types of edits you would make to a raw file. And that means they're also really handy for those of you who travel. With Smart Previews built for your images, you can travel without your original images and still adjust white balance, perform highlight recovery, and all of those things that you like to do to a raw file. Smart Previews are stored in a Lightroom catalog, so as long as you're traveling about with your Lightroom catalog, you have access to images that you don't have the original data for.

The downside to Smart Previews is they don't pack all of the pixels of the original raw file. That's why they are able to go up and down to the cloud very quickly. I build Smart Previews for every image that I import because I like the performance improvement that I get on my desktop computer. I use Lightroom mobile. And I travel a lot. So I'm pretty dependent right now in my workflow on Smart Previews. So I know I've got Smart Previews for all of my images when I import. And you can always double check an image here. You can see in Lightroom that this image has both an original file, and a Smart Preview already built for it.

If I were to take this image into Photoshop through Lightroom's round tripping process, it would render a TIFF file. I would work on that TIFF file in Photoshop and save it and that TIFF file would automatically be imported back into Lightroom. That's probably something you do regularly if you work with both Lightroom and Photoshop. The problem is when that Photoshop document comes back into Lightroom, there's no Smart Preview for it. There's not a Smart Preview build step built into that round tripping process. That's not going to affect you in every day to day...

Every day work that you do at home, but what I found is sometimes when I go on the road, I get out in the field and want to do something with an image and realize I don't have the Smart Preview for it. If I have the original file, that's great. But if it's something I didn't bring the original for, then that great Smart Preview advantage for field work is gone. So I want to show you a quick way that you can find all of the images in your library that don't have Smart Previews. Every time I'm getting ready to travel or just from time to time when I'm finding that... I've been doing a lot of editing and a lot of work, I will go through and do this step just to be sure that my Smart Previews are all up to date in my library.

It's very easy. In Lightroom, you just select a folder. I'm clicking on my main images folder. This has 44,000 images in it. And if I go up here to my filters, I can click on metadata and that opens up my metadata browsers. Each column here is a different criteria of metadata and I can change it, so if I... I'm going to open up this one. I don't care about looking at focal length right now. And if you scroll down to the bottom, you see something here called Smart Previews Status. This is simply telling you whether a Smart Preview is available for any particular image.

So if I tap on that, I can now see that out of these 32,000 images... In this folder, 31,000 have Smart Previews, 123 do not. I can refine this a little bit further if I want. I'm going to come over here and choose file type, and now I can browse just specific file types. Maybe I want to see if, only TIFF files since those are things that are coming back out of Photoshop. I want to see TIFF files that have no Smart Preview. And here's a nice little assortment.

Oh, I see there's some video files in here so I don't want... Oh, that's because I don't have TIFF selected. There we go. Here are my 21 TIFF files that don't have Smart Previews. Now I can quickly build Smart Previews for those if I just select all and go up to the library menu. Down here to the previews sub menu, I have an option to build Smart Previews. I can build all my other normal kind of previews as well, but I'm just going to check that right now. And it will set off building Smart Previews. You can see my progress bar here. On a larger library, that can take awhile.

I did this the other day and it was about an hour of chugging through 5,000 images or so that I didn't have Smart Previews for. But as soon as I unplug my image drive and went on the road, I was still able to do all of my normal ride. It's just like I always would. So if you do employ any of these workflows that I'm talking about, mobile workflow, taking your library on the road, or even just casual day to day stuff. Maybe you're heading to a cafe to do work and you don't want to have to carry a whole bunch of extra drives with you, it's very important if you want to do any of those things to be sure your Smart Previews are up to date.

If you're building Smart Previews every time you import, you're going to be fine, but if you do any round tripping, there's a chance you're going to have stuff in your library that doesn't have a Smart Preview. There's a very simple way to get them built.