Lightroom Classic: Support cataloging PSB files (files larger than 2 GB PSDs and 4 GB TIFFs)

I'm so happy to finally see PSB support in Lightroom Classic! PSBs are part of my daily workflow as a commercial photographer, and I have been waiting for this update for years. Thank you Adobe!

Yes, thank you, Adobe. A very long time in coming. Such a badly needed feature. We look forward to larger dimension importability in the future. One suggestion: while I know Adobe, nor any company, wants to promise features and not deliver, it would have been considerate if 3-6 months ago, Adobe told us, hey, we're listening and we're currently developing this functionality, so stay tuned. The total silence during this lengthy request was very alienating and really was unneccessary for a company with customer-driven products like Adobe.

Can we, perhaps as a stopgap, have large PSB render/edit in an Enhanced Smart Preview? This preview would be a DNG proxy that differs from a Standard Smart Preview in that it trades out speed for quality. It would be the same sort of smaller render but without a ton of compression/degradation (slower).

(Typical Smart Preview is a heavily compressed, downscaled, lossy DNG proxy, right?)

MANY of my files are gigapixel - I'm looking at a smaller one just built that's 55732 x 23346 px (1300 MP). I don't need 100% zoom on this file, but could use the flexiblity of LR edit tools like adjustment brushes/gradients, etc. Export would apply the edits to the full-res PSB. 

You can implement that stopgap yourself. Create your own proxy file in PS, add it to the catalogue, then in Finder/Explorer replace it with the big PSB.

negative. LR throws up its hands. 

That screenshot was from where? If the proxy file (eg a jpeg, a linked placed file) fits in the size guidelines, it should import and you should then be able to fool LR by swapping over the files. But I am only thinking about managing these files, tagging them, not doing things like adjustments that process the image.

So here on my desktop (left column) you can see a 60k*40k PSB that I couldn't import into LR, but which I added to a 6k*4k PSD using File > Place Linked. And in LR I'm making adjustments to the PSB.


As another approach, I changed the PSD's name and fixed the missing file by pointing at the PSB

Now I have the actual PSB catalogued in LR, so I can manage it, but metadata won't save to the file and I can't adjust it in LR.

I'd go for the first method, but I just wouldn't hold my breath waiting until there's no need for any stopgap.