In this episode I'll show you how to save hard drive space
and battery power by using smart previews in Lightroom.
Adorama TV presents Exploring Photography
with Mark Wallace.
Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography
right here on
Adorama TV. It’s brought to you by Adorama, it's the camera store that has
everything for photographers. It's the place where I get all my stuff
you should check them out at adorama.com. Well I'm hanging out
in the lobby of the hostel here in Lima Peru it’s a little bit noisy we’re sort of
outside
and I'm using my laptop here and we're doing this because really thats want I’m gonna be
talking about
in this episode. It’s for photographers that are on the go maybe wedding
photographers, location shooters that use laptops a lot
and also love to use Lightroom. One of the things that I do and I know you do a lot of you
do as well as is,
when you're using Lightroom your storing your images on an external hard drive
and you do that because
your internal hard drive doesn't have a lot of space and so it really makes
sense to throw things on an external hard drive maybe have a backup out there.
It really works well but one of the disadvantages of having an external hard
drive means that you always have to have this thing connected
to your laptop to edit your images in Lightroom.
Well that can really drain the battery if you're not connected to an
external power source because we all know these external hard drives can
really
run the battery down quickly. If your working on a plane or train or in a
lobby somewhere that really doesn't make sense. Well there's a nice thing
called smart
previews in Lightroom and what they do is they allow you to store your images
on external hard drive but then you can disconnect your external hard drive
and still edit the images on your local hard drive.
Now I know that sounds too good to be true but it really is true
and they're really easy to use. So thats what were going to be talking about in this
episode but before we do that I want to remind you that
Adorama has some terrific contests and you can win some awesome prizes. So click the
link
and enter the contest today.
Let me tell you about my setup I have
my Lightroom catalog in a folder on my desktop called
my Lightroom catalog and all of my images are on my external hard drive this is my
Lacie rugged
hard drive and they're stored in a folder called my photos. So
my catalog is here my external hard drive has all my photos here.
Well now that we know about that let's dive in and take a closer look. Well here's what I was
talking about. We have
the Lightroom catalog on my local hard drive on my laptop
and then we have a video drive. I open that up I got a folder here called my photos
inside that we have all the photos that my Lightroom catalog
is referencing. So the photos are on the external hard drive
the catalog is on the internal hard drive
on my laptop. So let's just go ahead and open my Lightroom catalog.
Lightroom 5 opens up and I’ve got some images here that I've taken
along my travels here in South America so far.
What we're gonna do here's is were gonna take a look at this little iguana that a shot in
the Galapagos Islands. Now when I zoom here,
I’ll zoom in. You can you see all the details on his nose. He looks great
and what we see here underneath the histogram
is this icon that says original photo.
If I go to the GridView you'll see that there aren't any icons
up on the thumbnails. We’ve got some standard stuff that we're used to.
Now watch what happens here when I disconnect my external hard drive. So
I'll go over
and I'm going to eject the video drive. The
external hard drive and I'm going to actually disconnect it from my laptop
and so there is no connection now between Lightroom
and my external hard drive. All of a sudden we see these little exclamation
points
that show up these little icons and if you hover over that it's saying 'hey this photo is
missing’.
The connection has been lost between the catalog
and the external file. If we open this up and let's try to go over let's say to
the developed module. Notice
we also have no histogram, that's gone. There's a little icon here that says this
photo is missing.
If we go over to the developed module and we try to do some editing here.
We get an error message it says this file could not be found.
There's no ability for us to do any image adjustments here that's all greyed
out.
So we can't do anything because the photo is missing and that's
no good. So what we’ll do is lets plug
in the external hard drive again. We’ll reestablish the connection between the
catalog
and the external hard drive. That happens automatically. So now that I have my
my external hard drive plugged in will see that these little
icons go away and we'll see that the original photo
little icon shows up under the histogram again we're all good.
We can go into the developed module and everything's working
as expected. Well i really wanna edit these photos without having my
external hard drive connected and so I'm going to create
a smart preview. I’m gonna do that for one file right now.
That's this iguana here. I can do that by going over here to this little
icon that says
original photo. I can do that in the library module or the developed module it doesn't
matter.
I’ll just click that and then it gives me an option to create
a smart preview. So I'm going to do that. The smart previews going to be created
and now look we have a different icon. It says original
plus smart preview. So we know that we have both
things going on and so when we go back to the
gridview we have two different. We have this guy here
it's got a smart reviewing everything else that doesn’t. So let's disconnect
are external hard drive and see what happens. So
now our external hard drive is disconnected
and check it out when we go back to our Lightroom
catalog, we’ll see that now these guys that don't have smart previews
created
have the same old 'hey this file is missing' icon
but this guy has a little icon that’s different.
It says hey I've got a smart preview and we can see over here
underneath the histogram we've got an icon that says smart
preview. Now what we can do is let's go in
and actually go to the developed module.
Check it out. We can still edit. We can edit now
on the smart preview. In fact let's do something crazy with this photo here.
Let's really go in and and make it different. So we'll make it black and
white.
We’ll make it super contrasty. Let's increase the exposure a little bit.
So we've made some huge changes. It’s no longer in color so obviously this is
different.
Let's actually change some pixels. Let’s take his
eyeball, and lets fix it.
We'll give him not in a skin over the eyeball there.
So we're actually doing some edits that we would normally need
that external reference for this to work. We don't need it anymore were editing
using the smart preview. Now the neat thing is
these smart previews are large enough that we can do some
exporting. So I can go in here and say
export and I’m gonna create one that's 1200 pixel
jpeg image that was created for Facebook it's a
a preset that I've already built. C heck it out I can actually do
exporting and all kinds of things. Now you can do full size exporting you
can export the original image because obviously it doesn't exist.
If you wanna do robust editing in Photoshop you can't do that so there are
some limited
things you can do. In fact I right click this and
try to edit this in Photoshop.
See there it’s all greyed out. You can't do that. So there are some limitations to the
smart preview
but you do have a lot of power. Check it out this guy here has no smart preview if
I wanna go to the develop module and do some stuff I still get that file not
found.
File is missing. So we've got the normal issues so the smart review
really helps out and the other thing is really nice is you don’t have to build smart
previews for every file.
You can just build those previews for the ones that you want to use.
Well let's connect our external hard drive again, as soon as we do that the
edits that we've made
to are smart preview are automatically applied to the original
image. So if you do wanna go to let's say Photoshop
and do some editing well all the stuff that you did on the smart preview
will show up. Check it out .Now that were connected again
I will right click say edit in Photoshop.
Photoshop is going to open and the iguana will actually open.
Remember we did that edit to the eyeball where I
sort of masked over the eyeball. Watch this. It's gonna
show up. Sure enough there's our crazy eye that I created
in Lightroom on the smart preview. Totally disconnected
from our original file and that is
awesome. Well what about the the options for creating
the smart previews. Well we've already shown you one,
and that is using the icon to click each
image individually to create those. The other way you can do that is, there's two other ways.
We can go up here to the library and then we can say previews,
build smart previews. Once you click on that you get the choice to either build one.
So you can say 'hey just want this image to have a smart preview' or you can build all of
them
and your entire catalog will have smart previews.
There's that. The way that I do it and I think it's the best way
is when you import your images you have an option to create smart previews
on imports. So I just inserted a card here.
We see some images that I just shot here in Lima.
We’ll just take this one image here. Up on the right side
in the preview window you see this little thing it says build smart
previews. Make sure that's checked and if it is when you
import your file. The file will be imported
and as soon as its imported that smart preview will be built.
Now remember if you're importing a lot of files building smart previous will
take a while. So your gonna add
a few minutes to your import. If there are hundreds of files
maybe enough time to go get a coffee. It'll take a little while but now we
can see that we have an original
plus a smart preview which is really
really awesome. Alright well the last thing we want to do is check to see
what are the file size differences between
the smart previews on the local hard drive and the external original files.
So to see that what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go into the library,
and I'm going to say, previews build smart previews.
I'm going to build all these by the magic of
editing in post-production. We'll see those all built.
So let me do that and we’ll show you the size differences.
Well all of our smart previews have been built. Now I want to minimize this and what
we'll do is we'll go back to the desktop here
and take a look at the differences between my Lightroom catalog so I'm
going to get the
info. We see that's a 130 megabytes with
all the smart previews built. Which is pretty crazy.
If I open this and take a look at my photos
its 2.1 gigabytes and so there is a massive difference
in the size of the smart previews that you can use in your Lightroom catalog
and external files that you would have on your external hard drive.
So you're saving a tone of space. Now the other thing that's really awesome
is if you don't even wanna have the small
previews the smart previous you can always go into
library, previews and so you can discard the smart previews and so you can
discard
one at a time to get rid of things that you're not using or you can get rid of
all of them
and so you have the options to manage your storage on your local hard drive
as you see fit and that is something that is really awesome. So you've got the
ability to
edit without being connected to your external hard drive and that
is a huge win in my opinion. You see the smart reviews are a huge benefit to
anybody that is storing their images on an external hard drive. Check them out
there easy to use
and I hope this episode helped. Now don't forget you can subscribe to Adorama TV
absolutely free
so click on the link and subscribe today. I’ll see you again in the next episode
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