Lightroom :: Exporting And Importing With Smart Previews?
Mar 5, 2014
i am a photographer who shoots on the road and has a digital tech/retoucher that is away from the location. with lightroom 5, i was excited to export my catalogs with smart previews at a fraction of the size to send out to the digi tech for editing. the plan was for him/her to then send back only the catalog files which i could apply to the original master files and export finals for the client. i assume this is possible, but am having trouble dialing in the workflow.
I understood that Lightroom does not use smart previews as previews in most cases and still uses previews as before for working on. I normally import as standard previews because this improves speed whilst working on them. I have just ticked the smart preview box for a couple of files that I thought I might want to work on after transferring them to my externsl drive and it crashed when set with standard, OK with minimal, I am now wondering if in fact the smart previews are the previews it works on and that by setting it to standard as well it has confused the program and that is why it crashed, but then why have the option of both or is it simply a computer resources issue trying to create both standard and smart previews.
I created a catalog with smart previews from my PC (Win 7, 64 bit) and copied it onto my macbook pro (OSX 10.9.1) via a thumb drive. I can view the photos fine, zoom in and use the develop controls. However I get no histogram, cannot export and below the histogram it just says 'photo is missing'.
The whole point of this exercise was to choose and export lo-res selects to customers when out of the office. I can't do that.
I set create smart previews when I imported my images...none show up.
I selected some files (with originals available) and went Library>previews>create smart previews...the tast bar zipped across the top left but no previews were created.
I haven't paid much attention to my smart preview status. I always import and create smart previews and watch the completion bar go across the page and see the message after import that x number of smart previews were created.
But when I look at my catalog files (which I keep on Dropbox if that matters), I see that the file shows last updated on OCT 30 and it's 7.68gb. If I do a spotlight search for the smart preview irdata file, I find it has the same date but is 9.3gb. In either case, the size seems smaller than I would expect.
On my laptop, the smart previews of recent imports are all there, so I'm using them. On my desktop (even when disconnected from the drive with the original files) I do not see them (since that machine is always hooked up to the drive that the originals are on, it doesn't really matter but I'm confused).
Is there some setting that I can't find where I've set a max size of the smart preview file? Is there any way it could be saving somewhere other than in the LR cat folder I'm saving to?
I observed that when photos are deleted while in a smart preview collection the photos are not removed from the smart preview collection. Resulting over time in a large smart preview file with unused photos, consuming your hard drive space.
It is therefor important only to delete photos when they are first discarded from the smart preview catalog.
When eventually photos are removed while they were available in the smart preview catalog the work around to delete them is to locate the catalog named: "Lightroom 5 Catalog Smart Previews.lrdata" and to open it with Lightroom. When opened you can select the photos and remove them. After that you can remove the folder from your Lightroom folders and the file itself will consist of only 0 bytes.
It would maybe a good idea that removing photos automatically would discard them from the smart preview.
Principles of smart previews and how they can be used with an external Hd but I wish to know HOW to transfer the smart previews from my pc to the laptop, work on them and then update my PC files whilst still retaining the smart previews on the laptop for future reference.
Naturally the smart previews would have to be regularly updated to match any work undertaken on the PC.
I’m trying to get my mind around exactly what Smart Previews can be used for. I’m wondering if I can edit them on another computer with a different Lightroom 5 installation. In the past, I’d export a Catalog from my Master machine, edit that with another installation of Lightroom on another computer and then reimport it to my Master macine. So, what I’m wondering is if it is possible to use Smart Previews in this workflow.
Much has been written about how to create smart previews, and how to work with them, but I am unclear about how to get them from my desktop to my laptop. The smart previews were created in a collection on my desktop. I'd like to take that collection over to the laptop. I have a usb thumb drive with plenty of space. Specifically, what is the proceedure to get the previews onto the thumb drive, and then view them on the laptop, using Lightroom? Further info: The laptop does not have a copy of the desktop's catalogue.
I want to make smart previews for all of my existing files and move the originals to an external drive. It goes without saying that I want the catalogs intact. I tried to do it but was unsucessful.
Is there a way to automatically create smart previews inside a collection?Now, I know how to create a smart collection of only my holiday pictures with a five star rating. That's not the problem, but is there a way that these pictures are automatically transferred into a smart preview?
I get it. I know I need to tell Lightroom that it's "this" specific catalog that I want to be working on while being away from my external hard drive. But, just so I understand the logic: I have to opne Lightroom with the external hard drive connected and then, ejected it so I could smart previews that I've previsoulsy build. There's no way for me just to turn on my computer, away from my external hard drive, and work on smart previews? So, I guess that this my real questions: If I make a copy of the catalog from my external hard drive onto my desktop, and I tell my computer to work with this catalog while away from external hard drive, will this clash everything up?
I'm wondering if it's possible to create smart previews for images that were imported into the catalog in a prior version of LR. As my catalog continues to increase in size, I'm considering relocating my images to an external drive (currently on the hard drive). I'm obviously concerned about doing any unintended damage to the catalog and workflow.
I would like to take my existing photo's on an internal drive and move them to an external drive. I would like to leave my catalogue where it is on my internal drive. I would then like to use smart previews to allow me to edit my photo's with or without the external drive connected and have the photo's automatically sync'd when the external drive is re-connected.
Now that Lightroom 5 is out. Is there a quick way to build smart previews for all the photos that are in the existing libraries? And is it recommeded to build them for all photos. Does it essentially save two files?
I have all my data and LR installed on a desktop machine. As I never find time at home to cleanse and work on images, I would love to do so on my journeys and trips... Therefore I installed LR5 also on my laptop and would like to play around with smart previews to shape my workflow.
Is there a description on how one can generate the smart previews on the main machine and transfer them onto the mobile device?
When I have this set up and running. Would the import and work on new photos on the run also join back into the main library once back home togehter with the smart preview sync or would this have to be covered by another workflow importing a new catalogue?
It worked when I first updated Lr to latest version (5,3) but for some reason it's not showing thumbnails anymore when importing pictures from SDCard. I tried re installing with no success.
I don't know where to look for, I am under MAC OS Lion - 10.7 -
After I've exported through LR 3 I am getting different tone qualities only with two different image viewing windows. The picture attached shows the example of the image on the left opened with Windows Photo Viewer is brighter red tie and bluer suit while the one on the right is opened with Microsoft Photo Editor is more darker red and purple suit. The one on the left is the correct image.
This is also happening when the photo is sent through an inventory management system we have. I am exporting with 600 x 1200 jpeg resize 72 dpi at sRGB, 100 quality, and jPeg mode in File settings.
I have created nearly 25 smart collections in a hierarcy for my workflow ... do we have any command in order to save them all together and later recreate them with their names, rules and in their original hierarcy?
Is there a way to have an image automatically go in to a smart collection when exporting to a specific folder? I have a folder on my desktop that I export every image I want to upload to flickr. I'd like very much for these to also be added to a smart collection.
is there an option to delete photos after importing from a camera or smart phone? For example, import selected photos from a camera and then delelte those photos on the camera after importing them.
This evening I wanted to import a series of images from my card reader using LR (just updated to 5.2 from the 5.2RC); I have ~240 images to import. I always have LR set to convert to DNG on import, and also to save a backup of the original raw file (NEF) onto a separate HDD at the same time. LR has always been pretty fast to carry out this process: normally just a few minutes are required for that amount of images (not including rendering previews once the DNGs are imported). However, today it's suddenly become painfully slow - as I type this, it's so far managed to import a mere 58 images, having so far taken about an hour and twenty minutes! Each image is being added one at a time, with a long pause before the next one clocks up in the 'current import' folder. I've never seen such slow performance with LR before.
I wonder if this is a bug connected to the final release of 5.2? I doubt it, as I would have expected to have heard about this by now, but you never know...
I have recently - in the past few days - set up a number (at least 80) of new smart collections that pick up raw images taken at specific focal lengths, as well as another set picking up specific apertures used for each raw shot in the catalogue (unlike the majority of my pre-existing smart collections, these new collections are purely there for interest really - nice to see which focal lengths are the most used for example - but don't serve as an aid to any specific workflow). In short, I've greatly increased the number of smart collections running in my catalogue. Would having a significant number of smart collections slow down the image ingestion process? For example, is LR updating individual smart collections on the fly as images are imported, and thus having to pick through each collection in order to complete the import (I'd always assumed that this would all be added to a central index in the catalogue that the smart collections feed from, but perhaps there are multiple indexes, one for each smart collection)?
I guess the other possible cause could be a corrupt catalogue, although both the catalogue integrity check and optimisation complete without a hitch and everything else seems to be fine.
I'm on Win7 x64, running the LR catalogue and previews from an SSD (with images stored on a separate HDD), with an i7 3770K CPU, 16GB RAM, and an AMD 5850 Radeon graphics card.
Often after making vectro pictures in illustrator i use exporting to Photoshop like a SO. But i can't realize, why after exporting some elements like a blur or transparent mask is losing?
I create various maps masterplans and often need to end up in photoshop Previously worked around the psd export feature. But I have found that most effective way for me is to export a flat file to photoshop then copy the individual layers from ilustrator into photoshop as smart objects effectively rebuilding the structure of the ai file in photoshop.
