Lightroom Classic 8: Previews catalog problem

Question

I have an Imac Pro 32 gb of memory and a 1tb ssd internal hard drive. I have a 16tb external thunderbolt hard drive. I updated to LR9, but was having lots of problems...called support and was escalated to a senior tech. He reverted me to LR8.4.1. Running good, but I had to recreate my previews catalog. So far I have created 1:1 previews of 100,000 of my photos. the catalog is 1.4tb. It took 4 days to create these previews. When it was finished I closed LR to have it do a backup. The first part went well but it bogged down when it started to optimize the previews catalog. After 8 hours I called support and was told to be patient as it was a large catalog. At 24 hours I got intermittent messages that LR was not responding. At 30 hours I got a message that my system resources were at a critical stage and I needed to exit LR. I called support this morning and was told that they would have a senior tech call me this week. Seriously.
I can run LR, but am not sure that the 1:1 previews are accurate because I had to interrupt the optimization.
Does anyone have any suggestions or thoughts on what my next step should be?
Thanks for any help.

Johan Elzenga · Answer

There is no such thing as a ‘previews catalog’. The previews are stored in a folder inside the catalog folder. On Windows this is a normal folder, on Mac it is a so-called package. A package is a folder that looks like a file and can be double clicked in the Finder.

Lightroom can and will rebuild any preview that it needs. There is no reason for you to build thousands of 1:1 previews. Let Lightroom build them if and when it needs them. A 1:1 preview is only needed when you zoom into 1:1 to check things like sharpness and noise. It is not needed for day to day work with your images. Lightroom will keep the previews up to date.

Cletus Lee · Answer

When LR Classic v9 converted your older catalog file, it renamed your previews folder to ' {new catalog name} Previews.lrdata'.  just rename that to ' {old catalog name} Previews.lrdata'. And make sure it is in the same folder as your old 8.4.1 catalog file.

Edmund Gall · Answer

One other fundamental question to consider: Why do you need to regenerate 1:1 previews for all 100,000 photos? Correct me if I'm mistaken, but you only really need a 1:1 preview when you're editing photos: so, if you've finished editing them, why keep the 1:1 previews (or regenerate them) and waste all that disk space?..

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Lightroom Classic 8: Previews catalog problem

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