Smart Previews for entire catalog?

[dpirazzi]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom 6 Classic

Operating System

1. Windows 10

Until now I have been using two computers for lightroom 6 classic, laptop for travel and a desktop for 95% of my work. Reasons for this bipolar workflow were primarily my need for speed and storage capacity. Switching back and forth was not difficult, but I missed having all my images (about 70k) with me while travelling.

The new year has brought a desire to simplify my life and LR workflow, so I'm looking at using the laptop exclusively, and turning the desktop over to the kids (the horror...). I've done some testing and lightroom on the laptop (i7, 16G, 1TB NVME drive) is almost as quick as the desktop, I think I can live with the small speed penalty. The laptop spends most of its time docked and connected to two large calibrated monitors, so no compromises there.

For storage, I'm thinking about keeping all my images on a 2TB SSD that is connected to the dock (and stays home while I'm travelling) via USB 3.1, and generating smart previews for the entire catalog (catalog and smart previews will be stored on the internal drive). The smart previews are big enough for anything I would want to do while away from the dock, and small enough that the internal drive will not be too full. New images will reside on my internal drive while travelling, and then be moved to the external drive upon return.

Has anyone followed this approach, and are there any downsides to having so many smart previews? Any other downsides to this approach?

Thanks for any advice,

Dave

 

[Califdan]

Haven't done this, but sounds like it should work fine. Just make sure that before you undock for a trip that you have a good backup of the Catalog and associated folders that you leave behind. Of course you should have such a stay at home backup of other stuff on the laptop internal drives as well when traveling.

 

[Rob_Cullen]

One downside- You will not be able to edit photos in Photoshop or 'plugin' editors (NIK, etc). But you will be busy with Lightroom editing 70k of images anyway.

 

[Mickey]

Very interested to see what you are proposing because I’m working on making a very similar change. I’ve run into a few glitches which I’m trying to work through now and I won’t hijack your thread with those since it doesn’t sound like you’ll have the same issues (desktop monitor lower resolution than laptop, presets not stored with catalog but in Dropbox via symlinks and catalog on Dropbox).

Good luck and I’ll be following along.

Mickey

 

[dpirazzi]

Thanks for the replies, I'm moving files and cleaning the catalog up a bit today, and will hopefully generate smart previews tonight. Will report back how it goes.