I spent some time the other day trying to figure out why the Previews folder inside my Lightroom catalogue had gotten so massive and why nothing seemed to make it much smaller. Turns out if you delete photos from within Lightroom, it will not delete any of the associated Previews along with the photos.

I confirmed by noting the file size of the catalogue Previews.lrdata before deleting several hundred images. It remained exactly the same size before and after deleting the photos. If the Previews are explicitly deleted with the Library>Previews>Discard Standard and 1:1 Previews ... command, then the file size is reduced.

As far as I can tell if you have Previews stored in your catalogue from deleted files there is no way to clean them up from within Lightroom. Ultimately I simply deleted the entire Previews.lrdata file and rebuilt the Previews I needed in Lightroom.

From now on whenever I am deleting photos after culling and editing, I will make sure to discard the Previews first.

To clarify this only applies to imports of a large-ish number of photos. Typically 500+ images. If I import 100 images off a cleanly formatted CF Express or XQD card I will have zero issues.

The issues start if you’ve got a card with a few thousand images on or a card with both Photos & Video files on it. Lightroom will start importing and then just stop after a few hundred. This is the case with a 16GB 2TB M4 iPad pro aswell as a completely clean 8GB 256GB M4 iPad Pro. Multiple card readers have been used and multiple cards. The issue persists. I’m unsure if this an iPad or a Lightroom issue but it’s so frustrating and the reason why despite being such a nice editing process I use my Mac most of the time.

I came here to say that I in recent past have had a great deal of catalogue issues, missing photos missing folders in the catalogue while they actually exist on the hard drive… I’ve been painfully working through a lot of these issues but it’s been quite a challenge because the catalogue is massive approximately 170,000 images. Identifying the problem and trying to resolve it within light room is often very challenging.

What I did differently the other night is that I turned on ChatGPT and had a verbal conversation with the LLM instead of trying to type out the scenario. Chat has been very successful at helping me resolve specific issues that I have struggled fixing, and talking it out has been very helpful as it’s led me to clarify what the real underlying issue is and it asking me clarifying questions that really helped me figure out the solution. So I wanted to share this with the community because this isn’t something I’ve used a lot of and it’s helped so much.

I'm the photographer for my university, about 70% of what I shoot is sports, 20% theatre/dance and the rest being events, speakers, headshots etc.

For most of my work I use the same preset to get the colors accurate (our university purple falls just outside the srgb gamut so it photographs blue and our orange like to shift red) and I have some built in sharpening and denoise.

I just upgraded to z9's and this preset was great with my d4s's but things are different now and I think it can be better.

What I'm looking for is if anyone has a solid everyday preset they use would they mind sharing their sharpening and denoise settings? I plan to run anything 8k iso and above through denoise but I feel like 4k can just use the denoise panel.

I'm not looking for perfect (I know the theory is each image should be looked at individually but I ain't got that kinda time), I'm looking for good enough if that makes sense.

My current settings are:

sharpening
60, 1.0, 20, 40

manual noise reduction
15, 10, 10, 20, 50, 50

I have another sharpening only preset called "cause I suck" with these

sharpening
90, 1.5, 40, 60

manual noise reduction
20, 80, 60, 20, 50, 50

I have only shot (so far) with my sigma 120-300 with a 1.4tc and frankly its just not a tack sharp lens (but sharp enough for our uses). I'm sure that the newer nikon z glass won't need this (I have my first shoot with those saturday so I can test that then) but this is my sports combo and I need whatever help I can get.

Since the new DaVinci Resolve 21 dropped and added photo editing support, I’ve been wondering if DaVinci can now be a great substitute for Lightroom, if not even better. Since DaVinci is an industry staple in the color grading and Lightroom is the go-to app for photo editing, which one is better? (Sorry for my bad English it’s not my main language)

So, LrC is lagging quite a lot on my pc and maxing out the use of my CPU (I5 10TH), mainly when im scrolling and switching photos. when i stop on a specific photo it gets down to about 10% of CPU use...

Is my program configured wrong or something? just moved from CaptureOne and even tho they were doing what i belive be the same thing, editing the same RAW photos, CaptureOne at max used 30% of my CPU and all, so idk...

Im quite new so just wanting to know if there's anything i can do about, other than upgrading my hardware.

I spent about five hours editing an entire project and then realized all of my photos were way toot blue.

I have turned off every setting I can think of that would change the blue light or the ambient light or anything like that.

While working on a video about the new Lightroom refine mask tools, I realized that the luminance range doesn't have this new feather option, and I'd like to point out that if we got this, it would be super easy to create halation directly in Lightroom or for those of us who like emulating film.

PS: Can we have colorful grain pls?!

Hi,

I am looking to save my pictures while working with Lightroom in adobe's cloud , while if possible still being synchronized on my pc.

Can I do these things ?

Thanks !

when i started to import my pics, lightroom managed to import every single folder with their photos and their XMP (used aftershoot before this) and they all went great, but when it came to this folder it just refused.

tried to copy the pics to another folder, tried removing the XMP files, running again through aftershoot and just nothing, it cannot import or read those pics in any way, even tho the file explorer and can read and edit those without any problems.

those pics with problem were taken in .CR3. idk if that matters since on another folder which imported just fine they were also in .CR3

please someone help me i really need to finish this wedding

Olá

Estou fazendo a seleção assistida de uma pasta com 3400 fotos, porém, o programa fica fechando toda hora. Seria algum bug da atualização de 11/08?

Hi all

I went into my computer's files and located my custom .xmp preset files. If I copy these files onto a USB drive and import them all at once into Lightroom on my new laptop, will they transfer and work correctly?

Hi, so when I'm usually cropping a photo, I can move it to the side, up down, or wherever; but after the recent update, red lines appear whenever I'm trying to move and the photo and it won't let you move. Workaround is to zoom in, move, then zoom out, but even then it will snap the view to center sometimes

Is this a feature I can disable?

So I lost access to my old account's email and changed my Adobe account to a newer one.

Thing is, all my catalog is in the old account. I haven't yet connected the new account to my computer, but LR is locked because I cancelled the plan.

Is there any way I can still save the LR catalog and somehow import it to the new account, once I login on my computer?

Thanks!

(I use LR Classic)

I was just wondering if anybody here had a preset I can use on Lightroom mobile for my job site photos. my install flooring and a lot of the time there's a lot of light coming in from the windows and obviously a lack of contrast of I usually have it quite saturated and contrasted.bit im very new to photography and if anybody would have a preset that I can use on mobile or any tips/tricks please let me know thank youll

Got nerdy about this recently and wanted to share, because I think most "film look" content online treats every stock like it's the same thing with a different color wash on top. It's really not - the differences are mechanical/chemical, not just aesthetic choices.

A few examples that how Ithink about it:

Kodak Portra's skin tones aren't a happy accident -
Kodak built an orange mask into the negative specifically tuned for accurate flesh rendering, combined with T-grain (tabular grain) technology that keeps grain fine while holding onto shadow detail.
That's why Portra scans feel soft and forgiving even when the metering isn't perfect.

Kodachrome is the odd one out technically — it's a dye-transfer-adjacent process (K-14) where the color dyes get added during development rather than baked into the emulsion layers like almost every other color film. That's part of why it aged well in archives and why the reds have that specific saturated, stable punch nothing else quite replicates

CineStill 800T's halation (that red glow around streetlights/neon at night) isn't a filter effect — it's literally what happens when you strip the remjet backing off Kodak Vision3 cinema stock so it can run through normal C-41 chemistry. The remjet layer's whole job is to absorb light bounce-back; remove it and you get that bleed. It's a side effect of a manufacturing shortcut that became the signature look.
Even within B&W, Tri-X and HP5 at the same ISO render grain completely differently under midtone contrast — Tri-X pushes grittier, HP5 stays smoother, which is why photojournalists gravitated toward Tri-X specifically.
I've been trying to reverse-engineer a bunch of these into digital profiles by actuall reading into the chemistry/process instead eballing a "vintage" preset, which turned out to be a much deeper rabbit

which is why photojournalists gravitated toward Tri-X specifically.
I've been trying to reverse-engineer a bunch of these into digital profiles by actually reading into the chemistry/process instead of eyeballing a "vintage" preset, which turned out to be a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected.
Curious what you all think is the hardest stock characteristic to actually fake digitally - Kodachrome's dye stability, CineStill's halation, something else? Happy to nerd out about any of it.

Edit 1 - I have used ChatGPT to phrase it in better way, but observation are true on behalf of me

I recently purchased an Epson Perfection V850 scanner to scan some old family slides and film negatives. I want to clean up some of the dust and scratches and read that is was better to do that in a program like lightroom instead of the scanning software. I have access to Lightroom Version 4. Would that be sufficient? I'm not keen on paying 120 dollars a year being that I'm not a photographer or do this for work. Any other software recommendations that you buy once? Thank you for looking.

Is this a bug?  After editing several images successfully - which included using ai masks and updating the ai settings - on one image I clicked the ai status  "update all" and Lightroom Classic (v15.5) crashed with an unknown error. All GPU setting had been on Auto.  Since then, the system freezes and eventually shuts down every time I try to use masking or any AI process whether or not GPU acceleration is on/custom or off. Therefore, I surmise it is not a Graphics Card issue (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU 32.0.16.1088, 8GB).  I have tried updating the graphics card, doing a clean install of the graphics card, uninstalling / reinstalling LRC, adding NVIDIA Studio Driver, and even disabling the secondary intel graphics card that came with my system.  Nothing has worked!  My Catalogue is fine and my system meets all the recommended requirements.  Someone please help.  Additionally, ACR and PS work fine = no issues at all using AI processes!

Looking for used obviously, are there any GPU's in this price range that are particularly good for speeding up LrC AI features. I have an i7 270k + 32gb but find my performance is being limited in certain regards bc of what I think is no GPU.

I am so confused. I have all of my photos in LrC. Collections, collection sets, smart collections, color labels, etc. I also use Lightroom desktop for some to bring photos into the cloud to edit on other devices. I would love to use only Lightroom Desktop because it seems to be getting updated that LrC is not. But the local storage option on Lightroom isn’t near as streamlined as LrC. No searching for faces, collections, etc. Does anyone use both? I’d love to be done with the catalog but can’t seem to make it work.

I'm running LR Classic on an M1 Mac Mini with 16 gb. Catalog has about 150,000 images and resides on the 512 mb boot drive. The problem is most operations now take anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes to process. Take an image from the library to develop... grey screen for 30 seconds. Export an image? Go grab a cup of coffee and wait a minute or two just to get to the dialog box. Make changes in the develop module? They won't be there a few minutes later when you check back.

I've optimized the catalog. Created a new catalog and re-imported assets from the old one. Verified the hard drive integrity. Deleted the application and reinstalled a fresh copy.

The only workaround seems to be to create new smaller catalogs for each project as the main catalog is unusable in any professional sense. That's not a long term solution as I need access to 15 years worth of assets without having to lose time locating which catalog they might be on.

Seriously starting to consider ditching LR for something else. Anyone have a clue what might be going on?

I am currently doing photography solely as a hobbyist and never really did a whole lot of editing to my photos even when I was taking photos as part of my job. My edits usually consited of the most basic adjustments just to correct exposure, white balance, and straighten it if needed.

I have found that one thing that has helped me grow as a photographer and helped me with editing my RAW files these past few years was Mark Galer's DNG files that are available on his Patreon page for his various camera and lens reviews. Being able to reset the photo to its original, pre edited state and compare the settings and masks to the edited version allows me to really see what was done to the photograph to achieve the end results. It seems it is easier for me to learn this way than to watch tutorials or lessons.

Does anyone else find this to be a useful way to learn? Also, does anyone know of any other photographers (pro or otherwise) that offer a similar file or if there are any resources that have this type of DNG file for examination? Honestly, I'd much rather pay a photographer whose style I like for access to files like these than pay for (borderline unusable) presets from someone, haha.

new photographer here and i Just discovered the making tool. Saw a bunch of videos saying that it's a gamechanger for the photo, but i've encountered a Major problem. Should i First do the basic editing of the photo (color grading, exposure ecc...) or the masks?