Lightroom Catalog Previews.Irdata size .. what is this?

[Wail]

Hi all,

Another Lightroom question ...

I have an icon in my Lightroom folder, icon called Lightroom Catalog Previews.Irdata and it’s over 27GB in size!

Can someone help me understand: -

- What is this folder / icon for?
- Why is it so big?
- Is there anyway to reduce its’ size, without affecting my picture library?


Thanks for any clarification on this.

 

[pxl8]

It's all the preview images LR creates so files are quickly displayed in library, etc. Without it LR would be very slow as it would have to decode every raw image each time you viewed it.

There are some options in the Catalog Settings > File Handling panel that let specify the quality, resolution and time to retain the previews so maybe tweak the settings to reduce space.

 

[Craikeybaby]

You can delete it and Lightroom will re make it. Some things you can do to keep the size down are:

Set Lightroom to delete 1:1 previews every X amount of days, I've got this set to 30 as I don't tend to look at images 1:1 after the initial edit.

You can also choose the size of the standard previews, these are the ones usually created on import. Yo don't need these to be bigger than your screen size really as if you need to zoom in to work Lightroom will usually make the 1:1 preview anyway.

 

[Wail]

Thank you, both, for the feedback. It's very helpful to know this ... I wasn't sure how safe it would be to delete, and what the ramifications would have been.

I figure I can now safely take a 2nd look at the 1:1 previews and find myself a suitable dateline to delete all prior!