My Lightroom runs slow. How do I speed it up?

[dougfalter]

Im currently operating Lightroom on my Mac 27 inch 5k desktop with a 1TB Flash Hard Drive with 923 GB of free space. My Lightroom Catalog and Raw image files are stored on an external hard drive to keep the computer from getting clogged. When I edit photos in Lightroom it seems to be slowing down. What is the best way to make sure my Lightroom is operating as fast as it can? Does it have anything to do with where i'm keeping my images and my catalog stored?

[Michael J. Hoffman]

Hi Doug,

the Lounge is for non-technical discussions; I'll move this post to the Lightroom forum, where more Lightroom experts will see it.

Meanwhile, Adobe has a pretty good compilation of tips for optimizing your system performance with Lightroom. You can find it here:

Optimize Lightroom performance

Mike

[dj_paige]

dougfalter wrote:

When I edit photos in Lightroom it seems to be slowing down. What is the best way to make sure my Lightroom is operating as fast as it can? Does it have anything to do with where i'm keeping my images and my catalog stored?

Please be much more specific about EXACTLY what tasks in Lightroom are slow. Storage locations of photos and catalog usually are not the cause of slowness in the develop module.

Please state the exact version NUMBER of your Lightroom.

Please state the exact version NUMBER of your operating system.

Please state the size in pixels of your monitor.

[dougfalter]

Hey DJ,

A good specific example of Lightroom slowing down when editing would be when I batch edit images (20 image files) I copy the the adjustments then highlight the remaining 19 images and Sync those settings to all 19 images. Sometimes the images never even change or the adjustments don't transfer. I also have to sit there for a long period of time and I have to scroll through the images to make them show in the large image display window for the edits to apply.

Also when I do spot healing and after only a few spots it will go slower and slower and sometimes not respond to me clicking on the each spot to make it active to move it.

Lightroom version 2015.8

Mac OS X El Capitan Version 10.11.6

My monitor is a  Mac 5k  27-inch (5120 x 2880)

With    AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4096 MB graphics

[dj_paige]

A good specific example of Lightroom slowing down when editing would be when I batch edit images (20 image files) I copy the the adjustments then highlight the remaining 19 images and Sync those settings to all 19 images. Sometimes the images never even change or the adjustments don't transfer. I also have to sit there for a long period of time and I have to scroll through the images to make them show in the large image display window for the edits to apply.

I'm not sure this is slow computer or slow Lightroom, it could be simply that the previews aren't updating (even though they should). In other words, this sounds like a bug to me.

Also when I do spot healing and after only a few spots it will go slower and slower and sometimes not respond to me clicking on the each spot to make it active to move it.

This is a known deficiency of Lightroom, made worse by the fact that you have a 5K monitor. To speed this up, you will probably have to accept some tradeoffs, which may slow down other things.

Some ways to speed this up:

• turn off the GPU acceleration (Preferences->Performance Tab->uncheck "Use Graphics Processor"
• do the spot healing as the next to last editing step; with lens corrections and transforms as the last step
• use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to do brushing and spot healing
• get a faster CPU

[anshulp39412687]

Hi doug,

Could you please try moving the catalog and images on internal Hard drive, and then perform the operations again.

[dougfalter]

Thats what I think I will start with first. Thankyou

[kentdesign · Accepted solution]

HI Doug,

When I kept my image library (all the photos) and the catalog on an external drive, I found it worked more slowly. So now with a 1TB SSD as a boot drive, I recommend you put the Lightroom Application, and the Cache and the Previews all on that "Flash" SSD drive. That's helped me and it is definitely working faster.

ALSO, I highly recommend Victoria Brampton's, aka the Lightroom Queen,  book which is a free download. The book is called

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC/6 Performance and you can find it here: (I also highly recommend you become a member of her site as she not only explains topics very well and clearly, she is also correct in her explanations!

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/performance/

And I recommend reading through this Adobe support document on Optimizing performance just as a general overview:

Optimize Lightroom performance

[dj_paige]

kentdesign wrote:

HI Doug,

When I kept my image library (all the photos) and the catalog on an external drive, I found it worked more slowly. So now with a 1TB SSD as a boot drive, I recommend you put the Lightroom Ap

He is talking about slowness during editing. As far as I know, putting the catalog on an SSD will speed up the Library Module, but not editing. Did you find putting the catalog on the SSD drive caused an improvement in editing speed?

[kentdesign]

If you build 1:1 previews AND use Smart Previews and have those on the SSD drive, it does make most editing faster. Just don't plan on using smart previews for editing noise and sharpening. Make sure that your Preferences are set to "use Smart Previews instead of Originals for Image editing!!!" (Preferences >Performance)

Victoria's book is the best and most concise work I have read regarding improving Lightroom speed. She has several more tips in there.

What I have been doing now is putting a folder of images on my boot SSD desktop while I sort and particularly edit. Then when most of the editing is done, I move that folder of images using Lightroom (and that is key) back to my external drive where all my 100,000 plus images are stored.

This has been the fastest workflow I have found. However you must be diligent in moving images on your drives through Lightroom and never doing this from the finder!

[dj_paige]

Wouldn't smart previews speed up editing regardless of what drive they are stored on? You're getting the improved editing speed from the smart preview, not from the disk it is on.

I have to disagree that moving photos through Lightroom is the best way to go. In fact I disagree that putting photos on an SSD is a good thing to do. There are plenty of stories about photos disappearing through some bug when you move them in Lightroom. There is a very thorough study of whether photos on an SSD is actually faster than photos on an external HD, and the results indicate no difference. And you are ignoring the time and work involved to do the move, compared to putting the photos on the external drive straight out of the camera.

[kentdesign]

On my computer, using an internal drive VS an External drive in Firewire, eSata, or USB 3 mode, has definitely made a difference for everything.

And when I changed that internal drive to an SSD (internal) it has made the biggest difference.

The same Article you linked said this:

" Overall, installing Lightroom (includes catalog, previews and Camera Raw cache) on an SSD will result in the application feeling much more responsive than is the case with a conventional disk drive."

That was the article I used as an excuse to buy my internal SSD!

As for "moving files" there  are many stories on both sides with computer differences, connection differences and operator errors!

Again I highly recommend Victoria Brampton's book  - lightroomqueen.com and also these most reliable authors:

Colin Smith - PhotoshopCafe.com

Laura Shoe - laurashoe.com

George Jardine - mulita.com

[kentdesign]

I forgot to mention Mike Hoffman, who first responded to this query. He also writes very informative articles.http://www.tipsquirrel.com/portable-lightroom-catalog/

[LePetitPecheur]

hi,

check your antivirus solution.

I had massive performance issues only with Lightroom on two computer: laptop (i5, 8gb, ssd, intel HDgraphic) and workstation (i7, 16gb Ram, SSD, nvidia 1060 with 6gb)

Use of graphic card disabled in LR on laptop and enabled on workstation ()

Other software like Visual Studio, Office, Video editing etc.. worked fine.

I used Bitdefender Antivirus 2017/18, but i think this could be the case with other antivirus software, too.

The antivirus interferes like this:

1. it checks LR Catalog/pictures  and preview cache (which is under heavy use of lightroom, this leads to a lot of i/o traffic (and antivir action)

2. it checks loaded exe and dll of lightroom application (this leads to seconds of "what the hell is it doing?" in develop module when moving sliders or flipping through images)

2 Solutions:

1. make exclusions in Antivir for LR Catalog/pictures  and preview cache AND  Lightroom app folder/subfolders. Just everything that has to do with LR

2. use another antivir which is less stressing for Lightroom

I tried the second approach: Uninstalled Bitdefender and used the default ms defender solution of windows 10.

In short:  Now my lightroom is fast, even on my small laptop with mediocre hardware.