If you rebuild your smart previews in LR, do you lose your edits?

[sirhawkeye64]

Does this process of rebuilding smart previews cause you to lose edits that you've done or does this simply re-read the RAW file to ensure that the smart preview is not corrupt (ie. not change existing LR changes you've made to the photo(s)?

 

[Dper2016]

do you lose your edits?

No. All the editing data is stored in the Catalog.

Smart Previews are 'Compressed' dng type files created from the original raw data. If your original raw files are always available to Lightroom you do not need Smart Previews (unless you are using them to avoid 'slow-down' problems with Lr)

 

[bent christian]

If you set Lightroom to export .xmp files alongside the photos, you won't risk losing any edits.

--
I hope you aren't one of those folks that actually beeves anything at all that comes from the mouth of that blackman in Our White House - DickJenkinns

 

[sirhawkeye64]

If you set Lightroom to export .xmp files alongside the photos, you won't risk losing any edits.

 

[Dper2016]

If you set Lightroom to export .xmp files alongside the photos, you won't risk losing any edits.

Well you won't risk losing the 'appearance' of the last edit you did before saving the .xmp. (And that is only for Adobe programs)


But not everything is written to XMP files. Your full edit history that Lightroom stores won't show in there, and neither will the photo have a connection to any collections where it was placed (Books, Slideshows, Saved Prints), and if you have used Virtual copies, they are lost totally if a photo is removed from a Lr Catalog.

So best Lightroom advice is to regularly backup the Catalog, then you save ALL your work.

 

[sirhawkeye64]

If you set Lightroom to export .xmp files alongside the photos, you won't risk losing any edits.

Well you won't risk losing the 'appearance' of the last edit you did before saving the .xmp. (And that is only for Adobe programs)

But not everything is written to XMP files. Your full edit history that Lightroom stores won't show in there, and neither will the photo have a connection to any collections where it was placed (Books, Slideshows, Saved Prints), and if you have used Virtual copies, they are lost totally if a photo is removed from a Lr Catalog.

So best Lightroom advice is to regularly backup the Catalog, then you save ALL your work.

Thanks, I have my system set up so when I'm at home on my home network, I have a program that runs and copies/updates the backup of the LR catalog on my NAS drive, so that part is taken care of (it also copies any new RAW and XMP files I've added).

I'm mainly worried about rebuilding previews, as I sort of figured when you remove a file from the catalog, you lose all edit information (although, isn't the edits stored in the catalog itself? And the XMP files mainly have some metadata stored in them primarily?)