FeaturedLibraryLightroom Tips

Don’t Make Lightroom Standard Previews Bigger Than You Need

Hi Gang: How’s this for a late Friday post? (oh, and greetings from the Delta Sky Club at Laguardia). 🙂

This is just a quickie, but it can save you time and drive space, especially if the catalog you’re working with today was an older Lightroom catalog that you updated to work with the current version. The tip is how to make sure Lightroom doesn’t generate Standard Size Previews that are bigger than the size you need for your particular monitor (it will do this automatically if you turn it on). Here’s where you find it:

lr-preview-size

Go under the Lightroom’s File menu on Mac (or the Edit menu on a Windows PC) and choose ‘Catalog Settings’ to bring up the Catalog Settings window you see above. Click the ‘File Handling’ button and from the Standard Preview Size pop-up menu make sure “Auto” is selected. That way, it automatically makes sure that when it creates Standard Size Previews, it only make the preview big enough for your display.

That’s all there is to it! Hope you find that helpful (and sorry for the late post-a-roonie).

Thanks NYC and PPE!
A big thank to all the awesome folks up here in NYC at the Photo Plus Expo who stopped me to tell me they read this blog every week – I met so many great people – what a treat!

Hope you all have a great weekend (I’m going to sleep in late tomorrow!).

Best,

-Scott

P.S. I’m in Sacramento on Monday with my seminar. If you want to come on out, it’s not too late. 

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4 comments

  1. dwig 22 October, 2016 at 11:06 Reply

    While it is implied in the first few sentences, it should be pointed out specifically that this is NOT a global Lr setting. It will only affect Lr’s behavior with the one Catalog that you have open at the time you make this change. You should consider reviewing all of your catalogs individually to see which ones may need this change.

  2. Cliff Baughen 22 October, 2016 at 02:53 Reply

    The assumption is that you are using one monitor. I use 3 monitors in landscape mode as 1 desktop (for other reasons). The default of Auto, in my case, would be 5760 px and therefore I stick with 1440 px.

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