Today’s Question: In Lightroom Classic I have a folder labeled “Imported Photos” with 2,153 images. All carry a designation “downloaded-smart-previews”. Can I safely delete these without losing the original image? If so, what is the best way to do the delete?
Tim’s Quick Answer: As long as you don’t have any original photos that are missing that could be represented by these Smart Previews, you can safely delete the applicable Smart Preview images and the folder.
More Detail: When images appear as standalone Smart Previews in Lightroom Classic, it is generally an indication that at some point you changed which catalog was being synchronized to the cloud. In that situation, any images that had been in cloud storage prior to enabling synchronization for a different catalog would be synchronized to the new catalog. The result is Smart Previews that appear as standalone images.
As long as you’re confident that the Smart Previews do indeed relate to images that had previously been synchronized to the cloud, and that the original files the Smart Previews were generated from are still accounted for, then you can safely delete the Smart Previews.
To delete the downloaded Smart Previews, you can browse the folder that contains the Smart Preview downloads, select all of them in the grid view, and choose Photo > Remove Photos from the menu. In the confirmation dialog click the “Delete from Disk” button so the source files will be deleted. Then right-click on the empty folder and choose “Remove” from the popup menu to delete the folder.
It is important to keep in mind that if for any reason the source photos related to the Smart Previews have been lost, you don’t want to delete the Smart Previews because they can be used to recover reduced-resolution copies of the source images. But it is quite likely that in this case the Smart Previews are just superfluous images created based on a change in synchronization to the cloud for Lightroom Classic.
