Lightroom CC & RAM

[planetf1]

I love the 'promise' of Lightroom CC but it took quite a number of updates over a number of months before I had it working stably, meaning I can

- import, edit photos in detail on my Home PC (4core/8 thread, 16GB ram, 4K display etc)

- edit the SAME photos on my iPhone - cropping, colour adjustments, tagging, ranking

- and have the photos accessible on my work laptop (MacBook Pro 15) when travelling on business

Just yesterday I thought I'd try installing Lightroom CC on my Microsoft surface. This is a device in-between my laptop and phone - ie a 12" screen, nice and portable, but not pocketable. Since 'heavy' stuff is done on the bigger spec laptops/pc, this is a mere 4GB i5 setup.

I installed Lightroom last night, but once I logged in LR started syncing. The sync process is consuming oodles of ram (I have 8GB committed leading to paging). I have my cache set to just 5% of storage (128GB)

I had really hoped that I could work with a smallish cache, and use this to edit photos whilst on holiday, perhaps at the hotel in the evening, or when on a long day trip over a cup of coffee, and with much more utility than a phone (the surface also has a stylus)

Any tips? Is this expected?

From memory I think it took a few days for LR to settle down even on my desktop pc too, so perhaps the up-front cost (10k photos+, 650GB) is too high...

The editing tasks I expect to do are more mobile-esque, but with a little more editing when needed (Im a total amateur). Is my expectation unreasonable

Finally WHY do I have to 'sign out' of my other devices... only 2 active at once? Why not ensure every app 'signs in' under the covered every 7-14 days or so. that's fine, but the user interaction to have to do this is tedious! It's a cloud enabled service! the WHOLE POINT is being able to edit from anywhere. What if gmail worked like this! Duh!

[planetf1]

This evening I tried installing LR CC on my Macbook Pro 15 2016 16GB - so a much higher spec machine. I see it too is running at around 2.5 cores busy and taking 7GB of ram.

Then I think back to my initial experience on my 16GB pretty fast desktop and how it seemed to take days to get going...

Is there a way to speed up that initial *stuff* that LR CC does after install. I really never expected it to take this much resource .

I've yet to go back to my poor 4GB surface, perhaps it will manage ok once setup has completed but I had to give up after a day

I just went back to my desktop to check all was well there.. and check how many photos I had (I think it's about 135k) and of course remembered that to use on my surface I had to sign out of other devices - which I did. I'd been advised signing in/out was easy. No,signing back into the desktop is tedious and ludicrous. Having signed in, LR did not load up correctly until I manually exited and relaunched. On relaunching I got the twist circle for seemingly an age and it's now sitting on syncing. This is the PC that previously had 650GB or so locally stored. Wondering if it's starting from scratch again

Really trying to like/use lightroom CC but my experiences so far seem to say it simply isn't fit for purpose.