Well, I've sidestepped the issue of smart previews a number of times now, so it's time to get stuck in and be very clear what they are how to use them. So I'm back in my travel catalog here. I'm back in my 65,600 image catalog spanning the last 14 years or so. And you can see that my negatives are all disconnected. They're all off on my drive. Oh, so I have no access to them.

Just my previews. So let's have a look how this works in the smart preview department. Now smart print prior to Lightroom five prior to Lightroom five, this is how it works. Okay. If I just scroll down to the bottom of the screen here and find an image with nice smart previews, let's say this one will do just here. So you can see here all of these images when the negatives are not connected.

I've got these exclamation marks up in the top left hand corner. going on, if I was to click on one, it says the file could not be found. So what this means is I can still see the preview, I can still see the preview then I problem. But quick develop is old ghosted. So I can't do any edits. And if I was to go into the develop module, if I was to go into the develop module, we would certainly say, the file could not be found, the develop module slot is unavailable, no image adjustment to be had the photo is missing, it tells me there.

And if we pop back to the library, the photo is missing. It tells me that so that was what happened when your images were offline in Lightroom, 123, and four, but then, with the release of Lightroom, five, they introduced this wonderful new thing called Smart preview. Now you'll notice all my higher rated images up here have these smart previews attached to them. So you can say if we look at this image, for example, here you can see it's a different symbol. It's a different symbol up in the top right hand corner, right Rather than an exclamation mark, it's the smart preview icon. So what this means is even though the image is offline, even though the image is not currently connected, I can take this image and I can edit in the quick develop or mode of the point, if I press D for develop, take me over to the develop module.

And I've still got total control to adjust brightness, contrast and whatever you like. So this is the smart preview, this is what the smart preview brings to the party. It brings an editable file even when the negative is not present. So it's a pretty powerful thing. It's a pretty exciting thing. And I must admit, I had a pretty well established Lightroom workflow happening long before smart previews came into the equation.

So I had huge catalogs without smart previews. So when smart previews arrived, I had to kind of work out how I was going to embrace them how I was going to use them in my Lightroom workflow. So what I chose to do, what I chose to do is this because Sure, you can Create smart previews during import, but you can also create them lighter as well. So what I did was I went back to my old catalogs, and I selected all my images here. So I'll just go up to my top level travel now. So with all my images selected, I went into my attribute, filter.

And I said, Just show me every image of my 65,000 that has one or more stars. And Lightroom told me that was 13,000 13,168 to be precise of the 65,000. So there's plenty of images there with no stars at all begs the question, Why keep them, why not delete them, I couldn't be bothered to be honest to be too much hard work trying to decide which ones to keep which ones to delete. So I just leave them there. storage space is cheap, my Drobo is huge. It's not even half full.

So that's a problem I really don't have to worry about right now. I just keep everything an average overseas trip for two or three weeks. I shoot two or 3000 images. I probably want almost as for a few hundred of them. The rest I can just stay there. That's my that's my workflow anyway.

So what I do to get some benefit out of the smart previews is this, I go give me my one or more stars and then I can go Command A to select all. So all 13,000 images is selected. And then let's This is what I did once when smart previews first came out, then I went up in the library module under library previews and build smart previews. So you can build smart previews retrospectively for all your one or more Star images. That's what I chose to do. Why didn't I build smart previews for everything?

I mean, it seemed unnecessary. It seemed excessive, the smart previews take up space. I thought I would just do it for one almost us. So that's what I've done. It took obviously it took a significant amount of time to build those smart previews for 13,000 images. I can assure you I didn't sit around watching.

I did it overnight, and it was good to go in the morning. So now when I do have new batches of images come through, I don't convert anything to smart preview till I've done all my writing and ranking, then I'll just do the one star and above to a smart preview. Now, the beauty of the smart preview is not only can I edit, not only can I edit and adjust the image as much as I want, I can even export it. I can even export I print quality high resolution image up to 2000 pixels wide, up to 2000 pixels wide. So that will more than comfortably print at a four and you can probably get a decent print up to a three, they'll be a little bit of interpolation taking 2000 pixels up to three, but I think you'd be pretty safe with a with a decent image that it will still print pretty well.

So where's it going to end with this one day we'll just won't need access to the negatives at all. I will just be safely hidden away on a secure hard drive. And we can just work with proxy images that do everything we could ever want the image to do, until I guess we will Want to do really serious kind of big wad format, high resolution, fine art prints, maybe then when they do negatives, but for many purposes we won't. So that's smart previews. That's how I work. If that makes sense to you, I'm sorry, I don't have a clear set of guidelines saying you should or you shouldn't do this with smart previews.

I think you need to decide what works for you. It's a it gives you a great deal of flexibility. If you're happy to keep all your negatives on your computer, then you don't need smart previews at all. But if you want to keep all your negatives on an external drive, and still be able to access them in such a way that you can make adjustments to them without being connected to that drive, then you need smart previews. But as to whether you need it for your whole catalog, just your highest rated images, that's something you really need to decide for yourself. So that's how smart previews work.

That's how I use them. And, as always, welcome questions, feel free to email me or request I make a video exploring that from a different angle and We'll be more than happy to do so. Okay.