# Questions about Smart Previews, Proxies, local space and editing



## mikebore (May 17, 2020)

Background:

I have two Macs, and two iDevices all using latest Lightroom Cloudy on latest 10.15 and iOS 13.
I have 79K photos using 585GB in the Cloud.
On my iMac I have 'store Smart Previews locally' turned on and 'store Originals locally' off. On the iMac the size of the library is 90GB.
The MacBook is a new setup with fresh download of the library. I didn't want to give up a lot of space to LR on my MacBook, so both  Smart Previews and Store Originals locally are off. Cache setting is 25% of free space and library size seems to have settled at 27Gb which is close to 25% of the free space.
I think the numbers make sense and everything is working fine.

Questions:

I had understood that the point of Smart Previews was to enable editing without having to download the original, eg with no internet. But the MacBook seems perfectly well able to edit without Smart Preview even with wifi turned off. When I turn wifi back the edit syncs to the other Mac. Why is this?

The library contains 25GB of Proxies which are Smart Previews. 25GB is quite a high proportion of  of the 90GB needed to have Smart Previews enabled for all 79K pics. So a lot of my pics do have Smart Previews in the cache. But doing my offline tests I deliberately edited pics which didn't have a thumbnail image, so shouldn't have had a smart preview.

I noticed that even with wifi off the thumbnails were populating as I scrolled.

Bottom line is that I am not seeing much benefit to turning on store Smart Previews locally.

Thanks


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## Jim Wilde (May 17, 2020)

I'm not sure how you can edit an image when there's no thumbnail, no smart preview, no original, and no network connection. When you select an image with no thumbnail, look at the sync status of that image at the bottom of the Info tab.....it will tell you what is stored locally, and what is stored in the cloud.


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## mikebore (May 17, 2020)

Jim Wilde said:


> I'm not sure how you can edit an image when there's no thumbnail, no smart preview, no original, and no network connection. When you select an image with no thumbnail, look at the sync status of that image at the bottom of the Info tab.....it will tell you what is stored locally, and what is stored in the cloud.



Thumbnails get populated as soon as I scroll through, even offline, which is a bit surprising...maybe part of the 25GB cache is thumbnails for all. When I said before that I picked one without a thumbnail, that was a bit misleading because it always appears quickly. I was picking ones that didn't initially have a thumbnail, thinking that meant it didn't have a smart preview.

However, further sampling with wifi off has found many which cannot be edited off line, so I think I must have happened to pick ones which had smart previews in the cache before my first post, so that makes more sense.

The sync status on all 79K is a black tick in a white circle as far as I can see by scrolling through. Even the ones that can't be edited have this. This is the same as on my iMac which does have local smart previews enabled, so it seems there is no indication for local smart preview, only for local original (blue).


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## Jim Wilde (May 17, 2020)

The sync status in the grid view indicates eiher:

a) Original is stored in the cloud (black tick in white circle)
b) Original is stored in the cloud AND an original has been stored locally as part of the "Store this Album locally" command (blue circle)
c) Only a Smart Preview has been uploaded, i.e. from Classic (hatched circle)
d) Sync Error or other problem (Red circle)

But that's not what I was suggesting you look at....if you select an image and open the Info tab, down near the bottom is another Sync Status which tells you what currently is stored locally and what is stored in the cloud. Note that when an original has been stored locally (e.g. for editing purposes), but NOT when it was requested as part of the Store Album locally command, the grid icon will still show the white circle, not the blue circle.


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## mikebore (May 17, 2020)

Thanks Jim. As expected I don't have any b)  c) or d). Confirmed by filtering on Sync Status.

In the info panel, what I see as I scroll through grid view on the MacBook (which has some smart previews in cache) is that when I stop and select  a pic which does not have a smart preview it says "Local: pending" but that very quickly changes to "Local: Smart Preview" . Which all makes sense.

The only bit I am still surprised about is that when scrolling in the Thumbnail grid view with wifi off, the thumbnail images still get populated.


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## Victoria Bampton (May 18, 2020)

Some of that 25GB will be small JPEG previews, so it can show the thumbnails even when you're offline. And some will be smart previews it's kept in its 25% available space because it thinks you might want them.


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## mikebore (May 18, 2020)

Thanks for confirming !


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