Alright... What is the PERFECT Folder / Cache / Previews / Catalog setup?

[humenbean]

This program is unbearable and I'm about one step away from switching to other software. Every year this software gets worse for me and I've been using the same setup for over 5 years. Software is suppose to get optimized and work better overtime. Not worse. It's not like there's tons of new features or the program is going under dramatic changes... And all of the online recommendations here don't do jack. Smart previews, cache folder size, etc.

So I'm hoping to get some sort of aha moment, that I might be doing something wrong, with how LR is suppose to be setup now, vs how I've been doing it.

I have an SSD, and a RAID 10 drive attached via USB3

The software is on my SSD which is a 1tb drive, and has 800gb of free space. Overkill.

Everything else is on the RAID 10 drive. That way backups are easy to handle and if my main drive goes out, I don't have to worry about previews, settings, and all the edits I have done getting deleted.

I have seen documentation stating that it's good to have the previews stored where the OS is, and I have seen tests showing a whopping 5% difference when choosing different locations for cache, catalog, the software, etc. It's way worse than 5% for me right now.

Fresh OS about a month ago. defrag and cleanup regularly, updated my GPU, then turned it off in LR anyway, 4770k with 16gb ram, all programs, but LR closed, and developing photos is a nightmare.

What is the 'perfect' folder setup for this stuff? The most optimal setup... If I have to buy a second drive for cache by itself, I'm half temped. It's my last step before deleting this obviously un-optimized software.

Should I just create a new catalog every time I do 5 new photos and export it after I'm done? Trying not to get upset right now. As a professional, I've now wasted over 100 hours trying different things to no avail.

[dj_paige]

... and developing photos is a nightmare.

If this is the problem you are trying to fix, you'd need to be much more specific ... nightmare in what way? Exactly what actions in Develop are nightmares? Give us details!

[humenbean]

Sorry - Basically anything I do takes forever. If I try to convert to black and white, takes 3-10 seconds.

Apply general settings to all the select photos at once, then go through them... switching from one photo to another is slow. It used to switch within half a second, now sometimes it takes a few seconds for the next photo to load. When going through a few thousand photos a week, that's several extra hours of added time, that wasn't there before.

Hard to explain exactly what is slow, when literally everything is worse than it has ever been. I even deleted all of my presets. I have the LR generic ones, and about 50 extras. That's it now.

I could list off all the 100 different things I do, but not sure how that would help here.

[dj_paige]

Are you doing lots of brushing and/or spot healing?

What size in pixels is your monitor?

[humenbean]

Are you doing lots of brushing and/or spot healing?

No. The example above, of it going terrible slow, is from a single enclosed catalog where I...

Imported to my main SSD where LR is installed instead of my RAID

Rendered 1:1

Culled down to 500 photos from 2000

Moved said 500 photos to their own folder

Reset all LR settings

Emptied Cache

Dumped Previews

Rendered new 1:1 previews

Went to Develop

Applied a default filter I have used forever

Spot healed 3 photos out of the 500 so far

250 photos in, nothing I do helps outside of removing all adjustments that I have done to the photos, even though I never had a problem in previous LR versions

What size in pixels is your monitor?

1440 / 2560 - standard previews are setup for 2560

[dj_paige]

My unfortunate opinion is that this case seems to fall into that mysterious category of Lightroom running slowly for no apparent reason on a computer which seems to be powerful enough. Based upon my reading of this forum, there haven't been good answers provided in this case.

May I suggest one diagnostic experiment? Try setting your monitor to 1920x1080 and see if the speed of Lightroom improved. If that isn't a setting that is possible, then try resizing the Lightroom window to 1/4 of the screen as an experiment and see if things improve.