Editors Note: We’re pleased to host this guest post from Matt Kloskowski.

Starting with Lightroom 5, Adobe released something called a Smart Preview. Its basically a preview of your photo, thats big enough to let you work on your photos even if the drive theyre on isn’t connected.

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Why Use Smart Previews

Smart Previews are a great option for people who like to stay mobile because they don’t always need to keep their external drives with them. So whats the tradeoff? Why not build a Smart Preview for everything? Well, they take up space on your computers hard drive (or whatever drive has your Lightroom catalog on it). But how much space? Well, after running some tests, Ive found that itll roughly take up anywhere from 2-5% of the actual photos themselves. So, for example. If youre uploading 1 GB of photos and you choose the Smart Previews option, you’ll have a file called YourCatalogName Smart Previews.LRData thats about 25-50 Mb in size.

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How To Delete Smart Previews

A good practice to get in to is this. Lets say youre working on a photo shoot and you want access to work on it even if the drive the photos are on isn’t connected. Well, building Smart Previews would be a great option. But then lets say youre done working on that shoot after a few days and don’t need the Smart Previews anymore. Well, you can just go to the top menu (in the Library module) and go to Library > Previews > Discard Smart Previews.

Be sure to catch Matt at Photoshop World (April 8 – 10 in Atlanta, GA). Our friends at Kelby One are giving you a $50 OFF a full conference pass. Tell them we sent you by using the promo code PSWFOCUS414.