Lightroom Classic CC2018 7.2 Import Stalls

[Munwetsa]

When importing large numbers of images (4000+)  from a folder structure on Synology NAS, Lightroom import stalls at somewhere past 90% on the progress bar.

Same thing happens on Windows 10 and OSX High Sierra.

Lightroom still apears active and is using 100%+ CPU on Macbook, 30%+ CPU on Windows 10

Have disabled spindump and spintail on Mac to avoid deadly embrace when Lightroom uses a lot of CPU, so it's not that.

If I stop the import and try either import again or synchronize folder, it may add a few more images before stalling again.

I don't think it is a particular image, because it happens on more than one source folder structure.

Don't think I saw this before 7.2

Any ideas/solutions?

[Just Shoot Me]

Check the NAS to see if it is going to sleep.

Try doing smaller imports.

[Munwetsa]

I have checked that - it isn't.

And I have tried with smaller imports and still get the problem on a random basis.

I think it is an issue with the import in Lightroom:

By way of example - I have a folder with multiple subfolders and around 7k images.

The screenshot shows the Lightroom data for the folder after import and for Adobe Bridge.

The Adobe Bridge data matches the output of a shell script query to find the numbers of each type of files.

Lightroom thinks there are 1035 RAW files and 4369 JPEGs - adding the 1483 shown in the Synchronise dialogue above would give 5852, which is close to a correct count. However, if I click Synchronise, Lightroom shows a wait cursor for a while and then shows 0 files to import.

"Ignore probable duplicates" in import is disabled and "treat JPEGs next to Raw Files as separate photos" is ticked in Lightroom preferences.

(I get the same result if I try an Import/Add as I do if I try the synchronise.)

I get this on both Windows 10 PC and on Mac, although the import numbers on the PC differ slightly from the Mac, (PC finds 5508 images on the same folder structure, but also shows 1483 to be imported to synchronise).

I get this result on a range of folder structures on the Synology,

I suppose I could try dragging the structure from Bridge to Lightroom and see what that produces, but I am not sure if that's a good thing to do or not.

Ultimately, I would prefer it if I could just do an import from Lightroom and get the correct results.

[Jao vdL · Accepted solution]

Report as a bug on http://feedback.photoshop.com You have a much bigger chance an Adobe engineer sees it there and will investigate. If your NAS is not misbehaving, It is likely some strange interaction between Lightroom and the NAS. Lightroom has always been flaky in reporting how many new images there are in a folder but this is pretty extreme and the fact that it happens on both Windows 10 and Mac OS X is suspect.

[Munwetsa]

Thanks - I'll do that.

I tried selecting images, dragging and dropping from Bridge on the Lightroom import dialog and provided you do it a folder at a time, selecting images, Lightroom gets all the images. If you drag and drop a folder it goes back to the Lightroom image retrieval behaviour with stalling and missed images.

[joeg88617122]

Did you ever figure this out? I have been having the same issue trying import 25000 photos from an iphone.  It stopped at 5500 today.  It has rendered lightroom useless to catalog my images. Did they provide an answer for you?

[Munwetsa]

No, but it seems to have improved over time.

I am now on MacOS Catalina using the latest CC2019 version and it is not, touch wood, doing it, although I haven't imported as many as 20,000 images recently. But it seems ok now with a couple of thousand images.

Incidentally, I have a suspicion that it may possibly be a Mac error, rather than a Lightroom error - I think there may be circumstances in which something times out or loses sync on the Mac, because I have not been able to reproduce the error on my Windows 10 system.

I have also increased memory on the iMac to 64Gb, so it may be memory-related if it is a Lightroom issue. Unfortunately Lightroom doesn't let you specify which volumes to use for scratch space like Photoshop does, so I haven't been able to mess around with those to see if it helps.

Anyway, it seems to work now on the rigs above.

I have found that one can usually get through it by repeatedly performing the import - it just very tedious to have to do that.

It can take a very long time to create previews if you have a lot of images - you might want to try adjusting import settings so that you use embedded previews if possible and otherwise create minimal ones.

If you want something that works for cataloguing images and that also provides good image cataloguing, you might want to take a look at the ACDSee products for Mac or Windows. The image database management on ACDSee is much better than on Lightroom and the image editing capabilities are very powerful. However, it does demand slightly more understanding of image manipulation than Lightroom to get good results. It is a lot faster than Lightroom for import and so on. The Windows version always seems to have a few more features than the Mac version. But it is a good product and worth a look.

I haven't had any problem using it in conjunction with Photoshop and it has good workflow management.

[joeg88617122]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I have 16GB RAM on my iMac with Mojave and it chugs along until about 5700 then it starts doing like 4 files every 15 minutes.  My problems all started when Apple changed the file formats of all their files on the iPhone. At that point Lightroom stopped recognizing the originals as duplicates in my library.  It attempted to double my entire library and would stall every time after a few thousand. I was then interested in exporting the entire library to ensure I was not missing shots I did this using the Image Capture on the iMac.  However I have been unable to get them back into Lightroom now version 8.3.1.  I gave in today and have been importing them into an Apple Photos library on the external drive. I Apple Photos is awful I just want to make sure I can quickly export and organize iPhone shots.  I will definitely look into ACDSee as an option for file management. Thanks for the advice. You have been far more helpful than Adobe!