When Smart Previews first came out, photographers noticed the difference immediately. Is your copy of Lightroom slow? It definitely isn’t the fastest program out there and any improvement in speed can make a huge difference in workflow.Įditing the smaller, lighter Smart Previews instead of full-sized RAW files can significantly speed up Lightroom’s performance considerably. Smart Previews greatly improve Lightroom’s performance Standard airline seating can be pretty cramped and having one less thing attached to your laptop makes flying and working just that much easier.Ģ. No need for clunky external drives or any other peripherals.įor those who fly and want to get started on culling their photos without the added burden of attaching an external drive, this can be particularly helpful. If you’re meeting with clients, you can bring just your laptop and still have access to all your photos. You can take your laptop anywhere – into another room, to a coffee shop, the office, to a friend’s house or even to another country – and still develop and manage your photos.
Smart Previews allow you to travel with your entire photo library while leaving the originals safely at home – this is definitely one of my favourite features of using Smart Previews! Say you’re a traveller or tend to work away from home on a laptop. The first and most obvious advantage is that you don’t need to have your actual photos with you to work on them in Lightroom. You can edit your images without the original files present Using Lightroom Smart Previews has a few key advantages: 1. In fact, it’s easy to forget you’re working with a compressed file at all. While Smart Previews are low resolution – at least in comparison with the original file – most of the time you won’t really be able to tell the difference.Įven at 1:1 the previews look as good as the original file. When you reconnect your external hard drive, Lightroom automatically applies the adjustments to the originals, keeping all the edits intact across your photography. This is one huge advantage of Smart Previews – you can disconnect the drive containing your original files and edit the Smart Previews the way you would the full-size images.
Lr will preserve all your edit history so you can see the original image!) You can even switch between Lightroom before and afters with a Smart Preview (i.e. Unlike normal previews however, Smart Previews are fully editable in the Develop module with or without the original file present. With its longest edge measuring 2540 pixels, a Smart Preview is basically just a shrunken down, lightweight version of the original image. lrdata file alongside your Lightroom catalog. It’s a fraction of the size of the original image file and is stored in an. A Lightroom Smart Preview is a compressed, lossy DNG copy of a photo file.