Optimizing Lightroom for Best Performance: Top Ten Lightroom Speed Tips
It seems like all the talk online this morning is about the CNET article Adobe: Lightroom slows photo export on purpose. Stephen Shankland refers to a fairly technical article by Lloyd Chambers on Optimizing Adobe Lightroom.
Chambers discovered through a series of tests (which he details in the article) that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (version 2.3) was not utilizing all of the computer’s available cores. Read the article if you want the dirty details, but in layman’s terms, he’s saying that Lightroom isn’t taking full advantage of your computer’s potential when exporting (and importing) images. He identified a way to trick Lightroom into using more of your computer’s potential when exporting images. Scott Kelby detailed the trick on his blog, as well.
When exporting a large batch of images, just select half of the group you intend to export and start the process of exporting. As soon as they begin exporting, and you see the progress bar in the upper-left of the Lightroom interface, start your second export with the last half of the images. It seems that two smaller exports will finish quicker than one large one.
Kudos to Lloyd Chambers for his research on the subject (and to Scott Kelby and Stephen Shankland for bringing it to the mainstream).
So…what else can you do to speed up Lightroom? Here are my top ten tips for speeding up Lightroom (in no particular order):
Lightroom Speed Tip #1: Optimize your Catalog
Lightroom’s Catalog is a database. Without getting into the boring geekiness of it, I’ll just tell you that, over time, all that data in databases can get a little…well…discombobulated. Lightroom has a built-in feature that allows you to try to get things sorted out in the database (Catalog).
Optimizing your catalog is something you should do occasionally. How often depends on how you use Lightroom. The more you’re using Lightroom and moving files around, importing, deleting, etc, the more often you may have to optimize your catalog. Just to be sure, I’d make sure you’ve backed up the Lightroom Catalog before optimizing. To optimize your catalog:
- Back up your Catalog.
- Choose Catalog Settings from the Lightroom menu on a Mac or the Edit menu on a PC.
- Under the General tab, click the Relaunch and Optimize button.
- Lightroom will quit and restart automatically, and you should see a progress bar letting you know that your catalog is being optimized. If you have a large catalog, the process could take a while, so sit back and relax.
- Once the process is complete, you’ll see a dialog box telling you that Lightroom has finished optimizing your catalog. Click OK to open Lightroom and enjoy your (hopefully speedier) Catalog.
Click the Relaunch and Optimize button to start the process.
Lightroom Speed Tip #2: Get a Better Computer
No matter what you do, there are times when you just have to bite the bullet and spend some money. You spent lots of cash on that fancy new camera…just scraped and saved for a pro lens…well, guess what? If you’re processing your images yourself, a computer is a vital piece of photo equipment. Here are some articles with recommendations for computers.
If you can’t afford a new computer, why not check out Lightroom Speed Tip #7: Tweak Your Machine?
Lightroom Speed Tip #3: Don’t Automatically Write Changes into XMP
This one can be a bit tricky. My good friend and colleague, David Marx, wrote an article entitled The Mega-Important Automatically Write Changes into XMP Switch in which he recommended that most users leave this preference setting checked.
Lightroom Catalog Settings Metadata Dialogue
Please read his article and watch his video before following my advice to uncheck that preference. In practice, I leave the box unchecked, but I’m well aware of the consequences of not saving out my metadata to my files.
Lightroom Speed Tip #4: Close Other Programs
For seasoned computer users, this may seem like a no-brainer, but I’ve had many students and clients who complain about their slow computer and don’t realize they have 10-20 programs actively running at one.
I find this most often in those that switch from a PC to Mac. They click the pretty, red circle in the upper-left of an application window and assume they’ve quit the program. Take a look at your Dock. Any program with a little, blue orb below it is still technically running.
The Mac OSX Dock - Programs with a blue dot under them are open...even if you think they aren't.
Right-click (or Ctrl-click) on the application’s icon and choose Quit from the contextual menu.
To make sure a program quits when you’re done with it, my recommendation is to avoid using the red circle in the application window. Just choose Quit from the menu item with the application’s name or use the Cmd-Q shortcut. For example, to quit Safari, you should choose Quit Safari under the Safari menu.
Lightroom Speed Tip #5: Restart Occasionally
All computers can benefit from being started every now and then. I’m quite guilty of leaving my computer on all the time, so I have to remind myself to give a full restart once a week or so (more often if I’m encountering sluggishness).
Sometimes just restarting a program can give you a boost in speed. Lightroom has been accused of having a few memory leaks, so quitting and restarting Lightroom every now and then can help you out quite a bit.
Update: There is now a wonderfully handy free script that lets you quit and relaunch Lightroom just by clicking a single button. Click here for more on this excellent little utility from the Photo Geek.
Lightroom Speed Tip #6: Build Previews Before You Need Them
When you view an image in the Lightroom Library Module, Lightroom either needs to create a visual preview of the photo for you or call up an existing preview that has already been created. Calling up a pre-created preview is much faster.
When importing images, you can ask Lightroom to build previews for the imported images. [Here's an article on Using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to Copy New Images in from a Memory Card.] I prefer to have Lightroom build 1:1 Previews when I import my photos so that my editing process goes much faster. That, of course, means that Lightroom has to take the time to build those previews when I import, but that’s ok with me. I can take a break to grab a cup of coffee while those previews are being created and zip through the culling process when I return. [Here's an article on my culling process using Pick and Reject Flags in Lightroom.].
You have some say in how large Lightrooms previews are and how long they are kept. Under Lightroom’s Catalog Settings -> File Handling tab, you can set the size and quality of the standard previews and how long 1:1 Previews are stored before they are automatically deleted. If you’re low on space, set the Automatically Discard 1:1 Previews drop-down to After One Day or After One Week. That way, you’ll have 1:1 Previews waiting for you on import (f you choose to have them built from the Import dialog) and they’ll disappear from each photo you don’t touch for one day or one week.
Don’t worry. Once 1:1 Previews are discarded, Lightroom will rebuild them on the fly whenever you need them.
If you already have images in Lightroom for which you’d like 1:1 Previews created, simply select those images in the Library Module Grid View and choose Previews -> Render 1:1 Previews from the Library menu.
Lightroom Speed Tip #7: Tweak Your Machine
If you can’t afford a new computer, there are still lots of things you can do to make your computer faster. Here are a few suggestions:
- Keep it up to date. The latest operating system updates not only improve the security of your machine, but (usually) have slight improvements in the underlying code which can make things a bit speedier.
- Keep space on your hard drive. Your computer’s primary startup drive (typically the C: drive on a PC or the Macintosh HD on a Mac) should be no more than 60% full at any time. Filling that drive up until it’s almost full brings on a world on instability in all programs, and Lightroom is no exception.
- Avoid unnecessary bells and whistles. Now I love a sparkly Hello Kitty wallpaper on my desktop as much as the next guy, but did you realize that things like wallpapers, screen savers, gadgets, widgets, transparent window effects, reflective docks, etc can eat away at your computer’s processing capabilities? If you’re serious about performance from your machine, turn those niceties off.
- Choose your virus protection wisely. Virus protection is important, particularly if you’re using a PC (I’m on a Mac, and I don’t use it. Come and get me!), but virus programs are terrible resource hogs. Make sure you choose your virus program wisely, and make sure it’s not trying to scan all of your files while you’re trying to edit in Lightroom.
- Complete routine maintenance tasks. As a start, on a PC, this means defragmenting your hard drive. On a Mac, it means repairing permissions. There are lots of other things that can be done, but that’s probably another post.
Lightroom Speed Tip #8: Enlarge the Camera Raw Cache
The Adobe Camera Raw Cache file stores the file previews used in the Develop Module in Lightroom. By default, the size of this cache is limited to 1GB, but I understand that it can be increased up to 200GB! Go into the File Handling tab of Lightroom’s Preferences to make that change. For more on the Develop Module performance benefits that you can get from using a larger cache read this interesting article from Lighroom expert Sean McCormack.
The File Handling pane of the Lightroom preferences dialog.
Lightroom Speed Tip #9: Watch your Catalog Size
I hesitate to use this tip because Lightroom 2 has shown great improvement over Lightroom 1 in its handling of large catalogs. However, it is possible to have too many images in a catalog.
I’m not sure what the number would be, but I would not want to have more than about 90,000 images in a catalog. If you choose to split up your collection into multiple catalogs, my advice would be to store images in catalogs based on how you’d need to find those images.
I’ve heard of the “one catalog per year” theory, but that doesn’t make sense to me. If I have a pretty picture of a flower, I’d like to be able to find it whether I took the photo in 2006 or 2010. But, for example, if I’m shooting images for an assignment (like a wedding or portrait shoot), I rarely need to see photos from more than one client at once. Something to think about…
Lightroom Speed Tip #10: Embed Metadata When Importing
Metadata such as copyright, keywords, and location information can be added at anytime to a photo. Whenever possible, however, I try to add as much of this information as I can on import. If you select a large group of files later on and start keywording them, there can sometimes be a bit of a lag in performance.
Here’s an article on working with metadata presets in Lightroom and here’s an article I wrote about keywording in Lightroom.
This won’t work all the time, and you’ll definitely still need to add more metadata after photos are imported, but doing what you can on import can save you some time.
As always, I welcome your comments/complaints/compliments/suggestions. Let me know what you do to speed up Lightroom.
Filed Under: Getting Started • News • Tips • Tutorials
About the Author: Scott Rouse is an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE), photographer, teacher, and graphic- and web-designer in Missoula, MT. His photography focuses on wildlife and adventure sports and can be viewed at 
Scott -
Good list! Hands-down, one of the quickest speed improvements I’ve found is copying images off cards to a folder, and then importing a folder. LR takes much longer when copying them off a card.
Keep up the great posts -
Eric
Thanks for the tip, Eric. That’s a great one.
If I’m importing multiple cards from a long shoot, I’ll usually copy them all over to the hard drive first, then do one large import from there (rendering 1:1 previews). That way I can truly walk away and make myself some dinner while the magic happens.
In case it’s not clear from my stated time fillers, I love coffee, and I love to eat.
-Scott
Yep, that’s exactly how I do it. I’ve even considered a firewire multi-slot card reader, just because after a shoot I am pulling down 15-20 GBs worth.
I know exactly what you mean. I drooled over the idea of stacking a few of these Lexar Professional UDMA FireWire 800 CompactFlash Card Readers, but never committed.
-Scott
Thanks for posting that link – just ordered one. The ‘add to cart’ price ended up being $59. I’ve been wanting to try that for a while.
Sweet. Let us know how it works for you.
-Scott
Regarding #7 Defrag is essential in a Windows PC, especially when reading and writing and changing large files such as photos and or videos.
Consolidating free space allows for faster writes to the hard drives. In other words a more responsive experience when using apps like Adobe LightRoom
PerfectDisk is one solution here is a coupon code for a 25% discount: SHINE25 http://www.perfectdisk.com
Thanks for your comment, Eran. I’m not personally familiar with PerfectDisk, but I do agree that defragmenting your hard drive is an important maintenance task!
-Scott
I have done most of my research in the area of tip #2
I even went as far as having a spreadsheet testing times it takes to render/export and have develop be “ready”
Trying to see what makes the biggest impacts to time and seeing where processor, ram, HD speed all come into play.
I love the rest of these tips and feel like a retard for having my cache on main drive and not my fusioIO solid memory drive and upping it to abbove 1GB.
I’ll continue to work on tip #2 to be better informed on what computer and computer parts make lightroom the fastest.
You state no reason for unchecking Automatically Write to XMP. I understand that the first time you turn it on, Lightroom will spend a large amount of time writing all of your metadata to XMP, and this does slow down your computer. After this task completes, the time involved in writing future changes to XMP is so minimal that I can’t even detect it, and is done before I can click my mouse on the next activity that I wish to perform in LR.
So I have to disagree with you on this matter.
Paige,
Thanks for your comment. With the Automatically Write Changes into XMP box checked, Lightroom is automatically saving out most tasks to the file. With a fast machine (thanks, jarvie), and while working with single images, most users won’t notice a delay when editing images or metadata, but with a less-than-stellar computer or while changing metadata on dozens or hundreds of images at once, there is most definitely a substantial performance hit.
For my workflow, the advantage of being able to move rapidly from one batch process to another pushes me to leave the box unchecked. As you may have noticed from some of my other tips, I prefer to group slow tasks so I can use that time to take a break from the computer. For example, I have Lightroom create large, slow 1:1 Previews on import so that, when I return to weed out my rejects, I can zip through it. The same thing applies for the Automatically Write Changes to XMP switch. I move from one process to another quickly, then select all images and tap Cmd-S before I finish a session.
Not everyone agrees, of course. My colleague, David Marx, gives a strong case for leaving it checked in his related article.
-Scott
While I understand everything you have said, and I can see they are valid points from your point of view, I have a larger problem. The advice we usually get from experts regarding workflow issues is usually good advice for professional photographers. This is true in your list above, it is true in Kelby’s book, and so on.
And that’s fine. Perfectly valid.
But it doesn’t apply to me. I am not a professional photographer. My photos come from vacations and sightseeing and family events. I rarely cull, because I rarely take more than one photo of a particular subject. I rarely do batch operations (each photo has a different exposure and often slightly different white balance), and other than adding a keyword to the 70 photos I just imported (which I do at import), I have almost no batch operations.
So to all you non-professional photographers out there who use Lightroom … please consider that the recommendations about workflow from professional photographers *MIGHT* not apply to you.
Thanks, again, for your comments, Paige. You identified one of the real difficulties of giving tips or writing blogs or webcasts or whatever. Gearing content towards a certain audience is really tough when you don’t always know who your audience is.
For most of what I do, my audience is people like you. Amateur photographers outnumber professionals by the millions.
When we give our tips and advice here, we try to explain both sides of an issue. With Tip #3, Don’t Automatically Write Changes into XMP, I was adamant that readers should view the detailed post and video with an opposing viewpoint to understand the consequences of following my advice for unchecking that preference.
With my personal experience in Lightroom along with the experience of hundreds of students just learning Lightroom, I’ve found that unchecking the box can bring performance benefits. Plus, the habit of “saving our work” when finished is not foreign to most computer users.
-Scott
Whether to turn on ‘automatically write to xmp’ or not is one of those ‘how long is a piece of string’ questions. It depends on your machine spec, whether the files are on internal or external drives, and workflow, so there is no right or wrong answer. The speed hit is certainly greatly reduced, when compared to early LR releases, but can still be noticed in some situations. That setting will be a try-it-and-see for most people.
I do often recommend writing to xmp, whether by the auto setting or by selecting all in Grid view and hitting Ctrl-S/Cmd-S. It’s a good belt-and-braces backup system, but again, it doesn’t suit everyone.
It’s just a question of having all the information available, and the fact that Scott has put links to both sides of the argument is, IMHO, the best way of handling it.
Thanks, Victoria.
To everyone else, Victoria answers the question “Should I turn on ‘Automatically write changes into XMP’?,” along with many others, in her book, Adobe Lightroom 2 – The Missing FAQ.
Click here to read my recent review on it.
-Scott
“Your computer’s primary startup drive (typically the C: drive on a PC or the Macintosh HD on a Mac) should be no more than 60% full at any time. Filling that drive up until it’s almost full brings on a world on instability in all programs, and Lightroom is no exception.”
I have a 1tb drive: are you implying I need to keep 400gb free just to run applications? I cannot see any way how this can be true. Now, Lightroom is indeed a memory whore to put it mildly, but needing 400gb is just insane for swap/page filing. CS4 doesn’t use more than a few gb scratch on my system (with 8gb ram).
Personally I think it’s a bit of a myth that you need a set percentage free disk space- something better would be ‘twice your ram + 5gb’ or something.
Michael,
My advice to keep 40% free on your primary hard drive in Tip #7 has been brought into question quite a bit in the last few days.
First of all, I’ll say that, in my personal experience on my computer and the computers of others, I’ve found that drives without a significant amount of free space tend to suffer from instability (more frequent program and OS crashes) and lessened performance. I don’t have any data to back up that correlation, however.
Many of my friends and colleagues have been very helpful with providing their anecdotal evidence to either support or disprove my claim, but no one (including myself) has been able to provide documented evidence on either side.
My suggestion comes because of a variety of reasons that range beyond the instability claim. I’m out of the office the first half of this coming week, but I’ll continue to do my research and publish an article with my findings at the end of next week.
If anyone has any evidence (anecdotal or documented) to either support or refute my claim, please feel free to post it here, send it to me from our Contact page, or tweet it to me @TheLightroomLab.
Thanks to everyone for your input on things!
-Scott
Tip 6 Standard Preview Size.
What would be the best option? Your screenshot shows 1024.
I use a 22inch monitor.
Rgds
Patrick,
If you want to save space, you could set the standard preview size quite small (1024). If you’d prefer to have standard previews that fill your screen, however, the 1440 pixel option would work well for you.
Your 22-inch monitor is probably just shy of 19″ wide.
19″ x 72 pixels per inch = 1368 pixels across (approximately). The 1440 pixel standard preview size would easily fill your screen.
-Scott
Another reason its useful to copy all images into a folder then import is that you can now use the (silly name) Previous Import as a kind of digital light table. All the images from that shoot are in one place to do your ranking and such. For those that shoot several cards on a shoot, its useful to have all this in one location before you mover further. If you instead import a card at a time, the last previous import is now not accessible. I find I often then drag and drop images in the Previous import area into new or existing folders. To me, its akin to the analog days of putting all the images on a big light table, then deciding what goes into what sleeve.
For newer LR users, the #1 complaint I hear is “where are my photo’s”? If they start out moving images into folders then import, that gets them past that issue, they know because they actually put the images into the folders.
As for auto write XMP, well I’ll take the speed hit considering that I’d hate to lose that in the event of a crash or whatever. In v1 it was pretty darn slow. In V2 its much better.
Lastly, for you Mac users, don’t forget to turn 64-bit support on (command I on the app). Then you can use all that extra Ram.
Thanks for your input, Andrew. Great tips!
-Scott
[...] Lightroom Lab: Speeding Up Lightroom [...]
I’m just pushing 125,000 images in my first lightroom catalog. I think it’s time for me to start a new one.
I also just built a new PC system (i7, 12GB ram, SSD drive for my OS/programs, 4x1TB drives for images/backing up). Lightroom flies on this new system.
When I finish shooting weddings I come back easily with 40-80GB worth of files. I’ve had a single Lexar 800 Firewire reader, but last month finally got two, and just last week, just got 2 more (4 in total). They are amazing for being able to load 4 cards, dump them to a folder and walk away. Once I’m finished dumping all my cards, I then set LR to import and do all it’s work. It’s amazingly fast this way.
Amish,
It sounds like you have quite a system set up there. I’m sure some of our readers are jealous…I know I am!
-Scott
Hi Scott,
After maxing out my previous system with upgrades after 3 years, it was definitely about time for a new system.
I should mention that as a user of Vista 64x Ultimate on the previous system (with NO problems I should add) I made the switch to Windows7 RC, which REALLY adds to the system speed. Boot time to login screen is 18 seconds (the SSD drive really helps here for this). Photoshop CS4 loads in 2 seconds.
I don’t think SSD is still ready for mainstream yet (issues with TRIM support and whatnot), but if you are tech savvy and know what your doing, I highly recommend running your OS/Programs from a SSD drive (FYI I’m using the OCZ Vertex 120GB drive). Prices are coming down weekly, and before we know it, I’m sure they will become mainstream.
I’m looking forward to the day of SSD for primary drives (at least). I can’t imagine it’s very far off, either.
I’ve also heard good things about Windows 7. Always looking forward to the future…
-Scott
Hello,
I find Scott’s comments and thoughts worth while and helpful… However, I find the perpetuation of the 72 DPI vdeo monitor myth to be “Bronze Aged”. I am confronted with this myth fairly often, and as I proceed to explain that monitor resolutions vary widely, most are surpized and some are skeptical.
No matter whether this is some kind of convenient estimation on Scott’s part, the fact is that the resolution of most every worthwhile monitor is 90+ DPI, and many are well into the three digits. Using 72 DPI to compute image display sizes on a monitor is simply incorrect and not helpful. Indeed, using 72 DPI to compute the size of an image on a 96 DPI monitor will undersize the image by a full 1/3.
I would like to the folks here at LR Lab pick up the challenge of debunking the 72 DPI Myth.
Respectfully,
David
Thanks for the advice about database optimization. I optimized my catalog of 45,000 images and it took less than 3 minutes.
So far, exports of large patches of images seem to have sped up by about 8%. The main improvement, though, was in memory (RAM) usage. Before the optimization, these large exports were using nearly 100% of my RAM. Now, around 80% usage is normal. (These are exports of over 2000 images per batch).
With the lower RAM usage, I can now do other work on my computer again while the export is processed. This was nearly impossible prior to the optimization.
Thanks,
Alan
PhotoCitizen.com
Hi Scott,
Have you ever compared the import time of Lightroom to that of Photomechanic? In my opinion, the latter is much faster and since I shoot all jpegs, the images appear sharp instead of looking a little soft in Lightroom. So, I’ve been starting out in Photomechanic and then editing what I choose in Lightroom. Sounds like I’m doing extra work. Am I crazy?
Lisa
Scott.A couple of quick questions hopefully.I have just been reading this article,have optimized the LR Catalogue and increased the size of the RAW Cache.I noticed whilst I was in the Preferences tab that the cache is on the C drive of my PC but there is an option to choose.
1.What are the advantages and disadvantages of moving the cache to another drive
2.What would a move do to my current LR catalogue ?
Sheila,
Since Lightroom (and Camera Raw) are reading from and writing to the cache while you are working in the program, one could theoretically experience a performance increase if that file were on a separate physical drive from the one on which Lightroom is installed. That separate drive, of course, would have to be at least as fast as your primary (C:) drive and have a high-speed connection (SATA, FW800, etc).
I can’t see any strong disadvantage to moving the file. If the file were to become lost or corrupt, it would just be re-created.
A move should be transparent to you, even with your existing Lightroom catalog.
-Scott
That’s good to hear, Alan.
-Scott
Lisa,
I’ve played with PhotoMechanic, yes. Many photographers continue to use PhotoMechanic and enjoy it’s speed, however I do believe that you are really increasing the amount of work you do by using both programs.
Lightroom was designed from the ground up to be used for importing, editing (sorting, deleting, rating), and processing photos. Unless you have a really good reason to add another program into your pre-Lightroom workflow, I’d advise against it.
-Scott
Did you really add “Get a better computer?”
Article=FAIL
1. Don’t forget to defragment catalog file, and previews files – this is Very important.
2. When not used for a long tima – you can clean all previews just by deleting the Catalog previews folder.
3. Also large number of deleted files in Recycle Bin ca affect Lightroom performance…
These are useful comments, particularly since LR is so usefu and powerful. Its become the place I spend 95+% of my “digital darkroom time”. Just to build on the thoughts of limiting catalog size. I’m wondering about a good workflow to both limit catalog size but still maintain access to the original (and LR edits of most valued photos).
Does anyone have a suggestion on a way to create a new catalog with a subset of original raw images – say “5 star images” (including the LR edits) without going through export process (where the individual edits are lost)? Thanks.
Mark,
I believe that a single, large catalog really is best for most photographers. In the instances where you feel like you need to create additional sub-catalogs, Lightroom has an “Export as Catalog” function built in.
To use this, simply right-click on the collection from which you’d like to create your new catalog and choose “Export as Catalog.”
A bit more information on exporting (and importing) catalogs can be found in this article on Moving Images from One Computer to Another.
Best of luck,
Scott Rouse
Scott – thanks, great tip. I’ll give it a try, if feel I need to break up my main catalog. Some very narrow jobs I already treat as separate catalogs.
I’ve done pretty much everything you’ve mentioned on your Optimizing Lightroom for Best Performance list, but still my Lightroom is slow as molasses. My Lightroom performance has not always been this way. I’ve got a MacPro with 400GB of available space. I’ve got 30,000 images in a single catalog. The rolling ball is driving me crazy……..
Alison,
I know that’s really frustrating. How much RAM do you have in your Mac Pro?
Are you running Lightroom in 64-bit mode? Find Lightroom in the Applications Folder, right-click on it and choose “Get Info.” If the “Open in 32-bit mode” box it checked, uncheck it. Restart Lightroom and see if that makes any difference for you.
-Scott
Wow, you have now officially changed life as I currently know it with Lightroom. The un-checking of “open in 32 bit” DRAMATICALLY sped up the program. You have made my day – no, my week…….or even month. Thank you!
FYI, I have 4GB of “Memory” – I’m assuming that’s RAM?
Alison,
Glad we were able to help.
Yes, RAM and “memory” typically mean the same thing in computer terms. With that Mac Pro, you’d probably greatly benefit from increasing the amount of RAM in the machine. It’s something that’s relatively easy to do yourself.
I typically buy aftermarket RAM from Other World Computing or Crucial.com.
I also sent you an email yesterday answering a few other questions that you’d posed to David. Hope you got it.
Thanks,
Scott
Scott, you’ll have to change your “optimizing-lightroom-for-best-performance-top-ten” to “top-eleven”………
Thanks, Alison!
Amazing!! Thank you so much for this tip! I’ve been running LR for two years, even been to a training class, and this has NEVER been mentioned anywhere! MWAH!
Hi Scott,
Thanks again for all of your help, including your email answers to the questions I posed to David.
Best,
Alison
Hi Scott,
Unfortunately I’m still having “rolling ball” problems, but at least I’ve been able to isolate it, so I’m hoping you might have some further insight. It (this incredible sluggishness) only happens when the images I’m looking at are scanned images rather than digital capture images. Example: if I bring up a folder of 100 images scanned from film, Library Module, Grid View, and then I try and do something so mundane as deleting a keyword, the process might take 15 seconds. Same scenario with a folder of digital capture images displayed on my screen would be 1 second. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Alison
Dear Alison,
If I might jump in here. I think your experiencing the difference in processing time between say a 20 megabyte raw file and a 200 Megabyte tif. Huge files take more ram and more processing power. Even something as simple as thumbnail generation is going to grow slower as your file sizes grow larger.
Two thoughts:
1. Stronger hardware. Ideally, we would want to work with your medium format high-res scans (thats what I am guessing these are) on a quad-core tower with 10+ gigabytes of ram, a 64-bit operating system, and an array of fast hard drives.
2. Do you have the “Automatically write changes to XMP switch” turned on? Especially with giant tif / psd files this is always going to make Lightroom slower. Safer, and more user friendly, but noticeably slower.
I know this doesn’t solve your problems, but perhaps it clears up a little bit of the mystery. If I may add one more thing– this is exactly the sort of performance issue that Lightroom 3 should improve.
best wishes,
David
Thank you, David. This makes sense to me about the file size of the TIFFS. I believe we’ve got the quad-core tower, and I know we have an array of fast hard drives, so we’ll up my RAM from my current 4 GB, and look forward to Lightroom 3. And yes, I do have the “Automatically write changes to XMP” switch on.
I’m incredibly appreciative of yours and Scott’s time, thought, expertise, and responsiveness to my Lightroom issues.
Best,
Alison
Hi Alison (and others),
I have also found that leaving the XMP writing selected causes a very noticeable performance hit. My simple solution is to leave it off and, when I have finished with a good sized batch of images I select them all in Grid view and hit Command S (just like “Save”) on the Mac or Control S on Windows and LR writes them all then. I look at it like directing LR to generate previews before you start editing. I can walk away and do something else and the XMP files get written.
Greg