Account preferences

The Account preference set in the preferences dialog displays the account information for your Adobe ID at the top.

Click to access your Adobe ID account online and manage the account information for your Adobe ID. For example, you can change your password and add a profile picture.

Displays the space used by the photos Backed Up in the cloud and the Available Cloud Storage included with your Creative Cloud membership.

Local storage preferences

Lightroom intelligently manages your photos for you, so that your photos don’t fill up your hard drive space. This allows you to have space available and work on the photos important to you, even if there is not enough room on your hard drive for all of your photos. You can always view all of your photos in Lightroom, even if the original file is not stored on your hard drive.  

In the Local Storage preferences, you have the option of changing how much of your available disk space Lightroom is allowed to use. Originals are always backed up to the cloud. You have the options to store a copy of all originals and smart previews on your computer’s hard drive as well. 

Clicking the drive name displays your Lightroom files in the Explorer (Win) / Finder (Mac).

Shows how much disk space is required by the Lightroom database files, thumbnail images.

The amount of disk space that Lightroom requires may vary from day to day depending on your activity. Photos and videos that Lightroom considers as active and are likely to be viewed or edited by you, remain on disk longer than other photos. Actions that keep a photo in active status include:

• Flagging a photo as a Pick or rating it as 4-5 stars.
• Importing or modifying a photo with Lightroom desktop or Lightroom mobile within the last 15 days.

Shows the amount of disk space required if you choose to store Originals and Smart Previews locally, along with photos in an album, if you have enabled the option to store album locally.

This is the amount of space reserved for storing Originals and Smart Previews that Lightroom manages for you.

This displays the free storage space that is left on your device. 

Enter the desired cache size limit to specify how much of your available disk space Lightroom is allowed to use. To let Lightroom store more copies of your photos locally so that they are readily available for viewing and editing, increase the cache size limit. If you prefer to save disk space by downloading the content when you need it, decrease the cache size limit by a few GB.  

Select to always keep all the Smart Previews on your computer’s hard drive, in addition to backing them up to the cloud.

Specify where Lightroom stores your Originals.

• To change the default location or change the current custom location, click Browse, choose a folder in the (Mac) file picker window/ (Win) Select New Storage Location dialog. The new location is now displayed in the Local Storage preferences.
• To restore a custom location to the default location, click Reset.
  

Store originals on a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive

Introduced in Lightroom CC 1.3 (April 2018 release)

To specify a mapped network drive's path as a storage location for originals, do the following:   

General preferences

Options

Select this option to prevent your computer from going into the sleep mode when syncing is in progress.     

Allows Lightroom to use a compatible graphics processor (also called a graphics card, video card, or GPU) installed in your computer. To determine your graphics card make and model, click System Info.

Import

Adds the specified copyright text to the metadata of images that you import after enabling this option. By default, the copyright text field displays the copyright symbol followed by your account name. If the image already has a copyright metadata, Lightroom doesn't overwrite it on import. Also, the images that are already present in Lightroom are not affected. You can view the copyright metadata in the Info panel by clicking the () icon at the lower-right corner of the screen.  

Privacy

Deselect this option to disallow Lightroom to analyze photos in the cloud to detect people for People View. When you disable People view, all the existing face model data is deleted from Lightroom servers. Lightroom will no longer analyze new photos that you add and will not automatically group them into clusters in People View. If you have any existing clusters in People View, they are not deleted and remain the same. To know more about People view, see Find and organize photos of people in People view.

Interface preferences

Interface

Choose your preferred language from the drop-down list.

Choose a preferred text size to display in the Lightroom user interface.

Choose the Automatic or Manual option to have the panel tracks open/close automatically or manually.

Prompts

Click Reset to restore the warning dialogs and tips displayed after you installed Lightroom.