Is is possible to change the location of the lightroom catalogue previews database folder?

Mel_P

Mel_P

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Mine is huge (20GB ) and would like to move it off my 128GB (i.e. 119GB) OS SSD C: drive.

Can it be moved please?

Thanks, Mel
 
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You may already be aware of this but in Lightroom Catalogue settings there is the option to set the time interval for discarding 1:1 previews. I discard mine after one week as I prefer to keep my internal hard drive uncluttered. If you don't set a limit, the files will grow and grow, which may tend to slow things down if you have less and less free space on the internal hard drive.
 
Yes BrynBoru - I did notice that and reduced mine to a day. Didn't notice much difference! Thanks for pointing it out.

What I did note was that I still had LR3 and PS5 installed and I use LR4 and PS6 - so I uninstalled these and recovered nearly 3GB!

Mel
 
One of the poorly thought through bits of LR is that it expects the previews to be in the same folder as the catalogue. In these days of 100K picture libraries and SSDs it's pretty annoying.

As with many things in LR, the only way to move it is to get down and dirty with symlinks. http://forums.adobe.com/message/3404204
 
Will have to investigate what the "Link shell extension" is - not heard of it before!

Thanks for info, Mel
 
JonathanRyan said:
One of the poorly thought through bits of LR is that it expects the previews to be in the same folder as the catalogue. In these days of 100K picture libraries and SSDs it's pretty annoying.

As with many things in LR, the only way to move it is to get down and dirty with symlinks. http://forums.adobe.com/message/3404204
Click to expand...

Or you plan as i have and have several drives, 4 very fast, two large but slower. I have the cache on one, the catalogues on another with the backups on a third (slower )drive. This years raws go on another fast drive and exports and previous years raws are split over two larger drives.

Works well with great performance. I have I think around 126K images in my catalogue without any issues.
 
Byker28i said:
Or you plan as i have and have several drives, 4 very fast, two large but slower. I have the cache on one, the catalogues on another with the backups on a third (slower )drive. This years raws go on another fast drive and exports and previous years raws are split over two larger drives.
Click to expand...

Yes.....but......that would work so much better if there were a system setting to say where to store stuff. Lightroom was largely designed for the kind of use hobbyists put iPhoto to. Now that lots of pros are using it for huge catalogues we're starting to see the problems.

Even specifying where your presets are stored (so you can for example sync 2 machines via Dropbox) requires a hack. Most decent s/w just has a preference.
 
Anyone know the equivalent system for Apple, as Link Shell is only for Windows?
 
5 steps and you're already on number 2. As posted above

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3404204

If this all goes wrong, the worst it will do is start to build a second copy of the previews. Really, you can safely delete the "file" containing previews at any time and LR is fine (though I wouldn't recommend it while LR is running and using that catalogue)
 
Has anybody else tried this please? Space issue solved for now by moving my windows paging file (about 20GB) to the "spare" SSD I was going to put the previews on.
I would still be interested in achieving what I set out to do though.

Mel
 
Just tried it on my Mac and it works fine.

Note that the symlink should be called [catname]Previews.lrdata My symlink creator wanted to call it [catname]Previews.lrdata.symlink
 
It seems to give it the right name - and has the right folder as its "target" but doesn't redirect LR to my H Drive folder!
 
JonathanRyan said:
Just tried it on my Mac and it works fine.

[catname]Previews.lrdata.symlink
Click to expand...

Hello JonathanRyan - can you tell me where your link shortcut appears please - inside the oeiginal Previews folder on the C: drive - or does it replace the folder (i.e. do you have to delete the previews folder?)
 
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