Keeping previews separate from catalogs?

[_MZ_]

Quick question.

By default, LR generates image previews in a subfolder of the folder that holds that actual catalog file(s).
After some digging around I still can't see a way of modifying this behavior.
Is there a way to tell LR to store the image previews on a different drive while keeping the "lrcat" where they are?

Thanks.

 

[tspear]

Short answer is no.
Long answer is if you are comfortable on the command line, a few have created symbolic links in the file system and that Lr seems to respect them.

Tim

 

[_MZ_]

Command line? Bring it on, man!

Oh, I'm on Windows 7, btw

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Actually, you don't need the command line. There are utilities to create symbolic links. Just Google for it.

 

[johnbeardy]

It will be along these lines:

mklink /D "C:\Users\john\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom" "C:\Users\john\Dropbox\Lightroom application support"

This one points Lr's preferences to my Dropbox folder, so you can adapt it to your case. I save it as a batch file (.bat extension) rather than from the command line, and run it as an administrator. The first folder path should not exist when you run the script, so you need to start by moving your previews folder to its new location, then run the script to create a previews folder symbolic link next to the catalogue.

John

 

[_MZ_]

Wow! This is great!

Right now I'm in the process of sorting out all my data (not just the photos). Once I back everything up, the first thing I'm gonna do is try to get a symbolic link to reference the previews. So, for now I can't confirm that it works. Although I don't see a reason why it wouldn't work. So I wanna say "Problem solved"?

Many thanks!

 

[johnbeardy]

Remember though, sometimes Lightroom fights back

 

[_MZ_]

You don't have to tell me that. That's why I'm backing everything up first.

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

I do this and it works fine. Note you can completely wipe out the previews and they just get silently, if slowly, rebuilt. If you want to be save rename the folder they are in now, add the link to a directory already created on another place, and restart lightroom. I put mine along with ACR cache and temp files on a separate SSD scratch disk.