Import "Preview unavailable" problem solved

[tomos]

Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit
Lightroom Version: 5.7.1
Camera: Canon 5D Mark II

Hello,

I just want to share how I managed to solve the infamous LR import problem with "preview unavailable" message. Copying photos to the HDD and then importing them in LR worked, but not when importing straight from the camera itself.

I stumbled upon the issue a couple of days ago. It was sudden, without changing anything about my camera or computer settings - the import window just started to crash or display the "preview unavailable" message.
I tried everything I found on the forums and contacted Adobe support without success, nothing of following helped:
- restarting LR/computer (duh...),
- formatting or changing the memory card,
- checking for/removing video files on the memory card,
- changing user permissions of the import catalogue,
- purging LR cache,
- freeing additional space on HDD,
- resetting LR preferences to default,
- creating fresh LR catalogue,
- finally reinstalling the whole LR,
- installing newest version of Camera RAW.

I almost lost all hope if the problem could be solved but then I thought I'm gonna try one more thing, which was deleting everthing in Windows TEMP folders. Launched Lightroom after than and voila! Previews are back and import works as it did before.

Hope this will be helpful for some of you who also can't get rid of this annoying problem.

 

[clee01l]

one more thing, which was deleting everthing in Windows TEMP folders. Launched Lightroom after than and voila! Previews are back and import works

This suggests that your do not have enough free space on your primary disk drive (where /TEMP resides). All of those previews need to be opened/created and stored somewhere during import. LR makes extensive use of the /TEMP folder during import and other times. This is why I recommend keeping ~100GB of free space on C:\

 

[tomos]

No, that was not the case. I have all of my TEMP folders set on other partition (disk M) with 100GB+ free and as I mentioned earlier freeing additional space didn't help. Only after removing those TEMP files from disk M solved the problem.

 

[clee01l]

Only after removing those TEMP files from disk M solved the problem.

I wonder if that is something unique to Windows 7. Restarting Windows (as you said that you did) should have flushed the Working Storage