Lightroom Beachball of Death

[zeremkarty]

Long-time LR/PS user using a 2008 Mac Pro Quad-core with 16gb ram and ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card, main HD Serial ATA 7200rpm with 1/2 TB free plus three other internal HDs. Graphics Processor un-ticked. My jpg previews are set to Medium size/Embed Fast load data. I run PS concurrently (allotting 65% ram to PS) and routinely export a tiff from LR to work on in PS.

I wiped my main drive to perform a clean install of LR/PS (latest versions as of March 2017), only extra is one set of properly-installed VSCO presets. I have separate catalogs for my archived images and one catalog for images to be edited, usually under a 1000 total images in several folders, all pointing to one RAW file folder.

At first, performance seemed as it should be with no spinning beachballs. And some of my folders in the working catalog with less than 50 images in them and one custom preset applied seem to be flowing okay.

But...I have a couple of folders with 75-150 images where I'm applying different presets. These two folders are nearly impossible to work in. Every single click brings a pause and a beachball. Every slider adjustment takes 4-5 seconds to see the change. I've purged the cache, optimized the catalog, closed the app and restarted to no avail.

I thought perhaps the presets could be a culprit, but since some folders with presets applied function fairly well, I'll eliminate that for now. Another possibility is that LR doesn't handle Fuji X-Pro2 files well. One of my slow-performing folders is all Fuji Raws, but another bogged-down folder is all Nikon D800 Raws. (There were Fuji files in a folder of the same date that I finished up and then imported the Nikon Raws. However, the original Fuji Raws still exist in the same folder as the Nikon raws).

So I moved the already-worked-on Fuji Raws into a separate hard drive folder, purged the cache in LR and reopened. At first, I thought I may have pinpointed a problem because the workflow was moving along okay. But after a couple dozen clicks and slides, etc, LR quickly started surrendering to the beachball.

This program is really starting to s*ck.

Thanks for any suggestions. I would like to keep using LR and not jump to Capture One, especially since I need PS and it's part of the $10/mo CC subscription.

[DdeGannes · Accepted solution]

Quote "I wiped my main drive to perform a clean install of LR/PS (latest versions as of March 2017), only extra is one set of properly-installed VSCO presets"

When you reinstalled did you first install the LR CC 2015.0 and then update to the latest version LR CC 2015.9.

From the Lightroom menu bar check Lightroom > About Lightroom to see if you are in fact running the latest version.

[zeremkarty]

Yes, I did. Thank you.