# Lightroom 4.1 Running SLOW!



## Serious_Paul (Jun 1, 2012)

I am currently running Adobe Lightroom 4.1 on:

MacBook Pro 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM

With 2 Hard Disk Drives: one 60GB SSD (Which is used only to run applications from) and a 750GB 7200RPM HDD which holds all the data and serves as the cache disk.

I have noticed for some time now that even with what you would think would be perfectly sufficient specs on a machine, that my MB Pro pathetically struggles to run LR. The performance is reminiscent of running Adobe Photoshop on a first-run Pentium Processor with 512MB of ram lol. WTF?

Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do to improve performance? Does anyone else experience a similar issue? I'd appreciate any help that you all might be able to offer! Thanks!


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## Chris Burch (Jun 1, 2012)

No help to off but mine is running insanely slow on Windows 7 with 12GB of RAM and a Core i7 processor. Everything is slow, too...rendering of previews, applying changes, switching between photos, import/export. It's becoming unusable.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Jun 1, 2012)

Mine is running about expected with my 3 year old PC. 8gb ram, first generation i7 processor, Samsung 250 gb SSD, older video card.

If you want to see slow, try DXO.

It does take a while to render my 100+ mb images from my D800, but nothing I can't manage. Canon images from my 5D MK II or MK III are much faster.

I expect that Adobe is working on speeding it up, but until they do, I really do not have a issue editing 1500 images from a shoot.


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## Serious_Paul (Jun 1, 2012)

Well at least I'm not the only one experiencing this problem. :-\


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## e-d0uble (Jun 1, 2012)

I'm not a fan of griping about software produced by a loathsome company like adobe.. It's like saying "Darn those Nazis were real poopy-heads".. Regardless, I noticed that every iteration of this 4.xx version of lightroom is dog slow on my Core [email protected] 1.73GHz with 8G of ram and GeForce GT 435M. Sadly, this 4.1 version is no better.. It seems to really lag when I hook the laptop up to an external monitor. The 3.x versions of lightroom were far faster.


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## stevenrrmanir (Jun 2, 2012)

bloatware, and POS software that slows down your machine... why the sudden degradation in performance?

I hope some other company out there will release something useful, because this POS is NOT worth it!

software companies should be optimizing their software instead of expecting people to buy the latest PCs with the fastest videocard and 1 million GB of RAM...

i7, 12GB RAM is still not enough?

if you want to do something about it, write Adobe and tell them that you intend to return the software back because it has rendered your work, the requirement specs on the package are MISLEADING and INACCURATE and you want your money back!

without the threat of financial loss, they don't give a rat's arse


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## RichATL (Jun 2, 2012)

The slowdown has been an issue since the Beta...
I even made a video about it a few weeks back.
Lightroom 4 is SLOWWWWWWW!

The bottlenecking is most prevalent on rendering previews, and exporting web galleries...

Constant beratement of Adobe has yielded ZERO results...

I've been a LR user since the very first incarnation (pre-LR1), and this is by far the biggest screw up thus far.
and there seems to be no fix in sight, except for a complete teardown and re-build.


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## gary (Jun 2, 2012)

Don't feel alone I have LR4.1 on both my I Mac and Mac Book pro and it has been so slow it allows for time to make coffee between operations, very very frustration, not sure they will ever get it right. I am very disappointed that they didn't update LR3.6 to 7 to include the 5D mkiii, as that was much quicker.


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## Viggo (Jun 2, 2012)

I have a 3,6ghz i5 with 16gb ram and it's veeeeryyy slooooow here also.

I got it to run better for a couple of hours yesterday, after a reinstall and remembering to manually select Camera Raw 7.1 (since it doesn't to that just by updating, ridicolous!) And I could run the sliders realtime, and the changes happen instantly on screen and I felt like I wasn't in 1984 anymore. But then hour and a half maybe, in a catalog with 1600 pictures, it stopped and went back to doing nothing, zooming in takes about 10-14 seconds, and all the sliders just won't move, then I wait 5-6 seconds at best and they suddenly move a lot, then stop again... I also tried a smaller catalog, but it made absolutely no difference.

Adobe has seriously gone downhill lately. I hope they will charge double the money again and begin to make it work again. I have a bunch of friends gone back to Lr 3.6 because they don't have the time or patience (who can blame 'em) to sit and watch Lr 4.1. It's like watching a 90 year old run a stadium marathon, it was fun to watch the first few meters, than you just want to lay down and die.....


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## Ew (Jun 2, 2012)

Just when I was becoming frustrated with Aperture's speed and considering jumping ship (again) ....


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## Marsu42 (Jun 2, 2012)

Serious_Paul said:


> Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do to improve performance? Does anyone else experience a similar issue? I'd appreciate any help that you all might be able to offer! Thanks!



I already wrote this in another LR4 rant thread: disable nr and esp. sharpening until you're finished with the picture, it speeds up 1:1 rendering tremendously. And optimize your (large) catalog frequently.

However, LR4.1 is slow anyway, esp. the betas - my feeling is that the performance worsens the longer the program runs, so shutting it down and restarting it helps. However, after a restart it takes some time to initialize smart collections, don't have too many of them because they drag performance down, too.

The general problem is that Adobe rushed the LR4 release because they wanted their new process version 2012 to be used, but there are many issues like the broken autotone and they even keep introducing features without testing in a release candidate which should be a no-go.


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## fiend (Jun 2, 2012)

RichATL said:


> The slowdown has been an issue since the Beta...
> I even made a video about it a few weeks back.
> Lightroom 4 is SLOWWWWWWW!
> 
> ...



I know Lightroom 4.1 is slow as hell, but you compare COPY and COPY AS DNG. That's not a fair comparison because your computer converts the .cr2 -> .dng in the process on COPY AS DNG


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## RichATL (Jun 2, 2012)

fiend said:


> I know Lightroom 4.1 is slow as hell, but you compare COPY and COPY AS DNG. That's not a fair comparison because your computer converts the .cr2 -> .dng in the process on COPY AS DNG



Because I was using files from my 5d3 I had to convert them to DNG first (not recorded or measured)
I then imported to both LR3 and 4.1RC2 (which is what is in the video and measured) via "copy as DNG"
I did not measure how long it takes to import CR2s. Just DNG and JPEG. Percentage wise they are both the same percentage slower than LR3

Which in theory shouldn't take any longer than just plain "copy", but I wanted to make sure that it knew it was working towards DNGs and to render the packaged previews over again.

a note on turning off sharpening and noise reduction to speed things up.
...it wasn't necessary in LR3...so it shouldn't be necessary now...
but it will help things when viewing, but does nothing on import...
The sharpening and noise reduction are only applied (accurately) to the preview when zoomed to 1:1


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## mws (Jun 2, 2012)

I agree. I just upgraded from LR 3 to 4.1. I'm on a fairly decent MacBook Pro (2.2 GHz i7 w/ 8GB RAM), and it's almost unusable. 

Adobe better get on this and quick. I'm just a hobbyist, if I was a pro and had to deal with this, I would be pissed.


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## [email protected] (Jun 2, 2012)

Try opening a new catalog more often and starting fresh. Works for me. I love LR.


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## Tracy Pinto (Jun 2, 2012)

There are serious problems with 4.1 and just going to the Adobe forums will educate you. Stay away...


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## Marsu42 (Jun 2, 2012)

[email protected] said:


> Try opening a new catalog more often and starting fresh. Works for me. I love LR.



Is this a joke? I indeed did this once (saving metadata/keywords to files, new catalog, read stuff back), but all your collections are gone. For a program with a professional attitude, this hardly can be the solution... and creating a new catalog shouldn't be doing anything different from optimizing it in the first place.


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## pwp (Jun 3, 2012)

It's slower than 3.6 which from memory was slower than the V2. I now have the shipping version of 4.1 which is a little brisker than 4.1RC. After trawling through the 800 post thread on the Lightroom page of the Adobe forum, I picked up a couple of items that have been useful. 

The first and most important is that LR4 works quicker with DNG. So be sure to import as DNG and be absolutely sure to check the "Embed Fast Load Data" check box in Preferences. This adds an insignificant 80-100Kb to your filesize. Why do you suppose Adobe has added the "Embed Fast Load Data" option? It's pretty clear they've struggled with performance benchmarks, and kicked in with "Embed Fast Load Data" as a workaround. Also, go to File, and check Optimize Catalog.

The earlier non-public betas were absolutely glacial in the way they rendered files, responded to adjustments etc. But the software engineers knew the new tools were worth persisting with, and they're right! But those same engineers still have a lot of work to do to sharpen performance.

Filesize. I notice a speed difference between my smaller 1D4 files and the bigger 5D3 files. Spare a thought for photographers who dropped their _$$_ on a Nikon D800 and choose to process through Lightroom. Yar!

PW


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## jsylar (Jun 3, 2012)

I have both LR 3.6 and 4.1 installed in the same computer and I don't notice any performance degradation at all between 3.6 and 4.1.

The size of catalog of LR 3.6 is 673.13 MB and that of LR 4.1 is 907.3 MB. I have tens of thousand photos stored. A lot of times along with LR I have PS CS 5 running in the background. All fine performance wise.

Core i5 2.7 GHz, 8 GB RAM running Mac OS X. For storage, I have 1 TB 7200 rpm disk for system, applications and catalog (the catalog on its own partition), and 2 TB Western Digital Green exclusively for photos.


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## olivander (Jun 3, 2012)

4.1 RC2 has been the business for me... The speed difference between it and LR 3.6 (but I think there was a problem with 3.6 on my comp) is just incredible. I haven't updated out of it yet, because it goes alright.


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## jrsforums (Jun 3, 2012)

olivander said:


> 4.1 RC2 has been the business for me... The speed difference between it and LR 3.6 (but I think there was a problem with 3.6 on my comp) is just incredible. I haven't updated out of it yet, because it goes alright.



Suggest you move to the final 4.1. Amazing speed up of sliders response and rendering after adjustment brushes.

The Adobe team did a great job.


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## Marsu42 (Jun 3, 2012)

jrsforums said:


> Suggest you move to the final 4.1. Amazing speed up of sliders response and rendering after adjustment brushes.



It's true that bashing a product based on betas and release candidates is not appropriate. However, even if LR4.1 does show some improvement, the inexplicable slowdowns forcing a restart still happen - to catch up with LR3 stability, I guess we'll have until LR4.3.


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## jrsforums (Jun 3, 2012)

Marsu42 said:


> jrsforums said:
> 
> 
> > Suggest you move to the final 4.1. Amazing speed up of sliders response and rendering after adjustment brushes.
> ...



I saw a dramatic improvement. I don't have the fastest system, but I have tried to tune it to LR needs...i.e. fast processor, Win7-64, >8GB memory, SSD for OS, RAW cache, and LR Cat.

With 4.1RC2, I only had...significant...problems when doing lots of adj. brush work....which did cause, at times, the need to restart as processing time and memory usage increase...a lot.

LR 4.1 final has clear all this up. I know only see minor delays with LOTS of adj. brush work....no problems with NR on, second monitor active, nor, really, anything else. Have never needed a restart.

You seem to be aware of the current things to do with 4.1 to reduce processing issues. If you are having the problems you say, I suspect other issues in your system. What config and setup do you have?

John


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## RonQ (Jun 3, 2012)

I purchased a new I7 quad core, 3.6GHZ, and loaded 32 GB Crucial Ram. I have 3 HD's, first is a 560 GB SSD to run programs, 2nd 1TB to hold all cache and catalogs, 3rd 2TB to finalize my photos and storage. Even with this set-up and when running LR 4.1 it still lags A LOT......... 
I think no matter how fast your PC is and try to optimize LR the SLOWNESS and LAG issues will be there until Adobe decides to update the issue with their next realease (4.2 or 3 or 4). You get what you pay for, $150 or $99 for a powerfull program like LR will always have issues. My copy of Photoshop CS5 $799 performs so much faster that I can't keep up sometimes. 

My 2 cents!!


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## Marsu42 (Jun 3, 2012)

jrsforums said:


> You seem to be aware of the current things to do with 4.1 to reduce processing issues. If you are having the problems you say, I suspect other issues in your system. What config and setup do you have?



I've got the same setup LR3 worked with - 4GB w/ 2ghz core2duo & win7x64. Certainly not bleeding edge, but it used to work even with my 800mb 40k pictures catalog. LR4.1 certainly works better than RC2, but it's still useful to restart LR when the lags start appearing after working about 1h+ and rendering a lot of pictures - and a software that needs a restart to work like after 10min is simply buggy. But apart from that, maybe LR4 will never be as fast as LR3 because of the added functionality or because PV2012 is slower to render than PV2010 and/or I'll have to split my catalog into multiple smaller ones.



RonQ said:


> You get what you pay for, $150 or $99 for a powerfull program like LR will always have issues.



Maybe that's Adobe's way of saying: Apple forced us to lower LR's price, and now see what you've got


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## jrsforums (Jun 3, 2012)

RonQ said:


> I purchased a new I7 quad core, 3.6GHZ, and loaded 32 GB Crucial Ram. I have 3 HD's, first is a 560 GB SSD to run programs, 2nd 1TB to hold all cache and catalogs, 3rd 2TB to finalize my photos and storage. Even with this set-up and when running LR 4.1 it still lags A LOT.........
> I think no matter how fast your PC is and try to optimize LR the SLOWNESS and LAG issues will be there until Adobe decides to update the issue with their next realease (4.2 or 3 or 4). You get what you pay for, $150 or $99 for a powerfull program like LR will always have issues. My copy of Photoshop CS5 $799 performs so much faster that I can't keep up sometimes.
> 
> My 2 cents!!



I suggest you try putting the RAW Cache and Cat. on the SSD.

BTW for LR, anything more than 8GB is currently overkill, unless you need it for other programs....which may effect your LR performance if resident...depends...


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## jrsforums (Jun 3, 2012)

Marsu42 said:


> jrsforums said:
> 
> 
> > You seem to be aware of the current things to do with 4.1 to reduce processing issues. If you are having the problems you say, I suspect other issues in your system. What config and setup do you have?
> ...



Ya know....I started on a 4KB PC with a floppy disk...it worked well...and was FAST. It was a bit deal when we got a 5MB HD.

What you need to understand is that time changes and, as we want more function, the processing needs and size of programs (and OSs) change...i.e. get bigger and need more power.

I suggest that your processor and memory need to increase. Adobe said that LR4 would run on it, but...

I would fault them on not describing what was truly needed to get good response time....but I will bet that they were not even sure until the final tuning was done....and I suspect it is not really final, as they got most of the big problems, but will continue to look at ways to tune it.

Pricing is a financial decision...NOT a development decision. There is not a developer out there who doesn't want to create the best, fastest, most capable program they can....but there are trade offs. I am glad that 

Adobe made the decision to add function to LR. I would not give up the 2012 processing...it is a major step forward. A few upgrades are well worth it.


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## RonQ (Jun 3, 2012)

jrsforums said:


> RonQ said:
> 
> 
> > I purchased a new I7 quad core, 3.6GHZ, and loaded 32 GB Crucial Ram. I have 3 HD's, first is a 560 GB SSD to run programs, 2nd 1TB to hold all cache and catalogs, 3rd 2TB to finalize my photos and storage. Even with this set-up and when running LR 4.1 it still lags A LOT.........
> ...


I had that set-up on my i5 before this machine and was running LR3.6 same issue. 
Actually, I have a program that monitors RAM called ballisticks utility, I have seen LR consume around 12+GB of RAM when processing. Plus I have CS5 master collection and having PS, DW, and LR open I need the RAM power.


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## Marsu42 (Jun 4, 2012)

jrsforums said:


> What you need to understand is that time changes and, as we want more function, the processing needs and size of programs (and OSs) change...i.e. get bigger and need more power.bI suggest that your processor and memory need to increase. Adobe said that LR4 would run on it, but...
> 
> Adobe made the decision to add function to LR. I would not give up the 2012 processing...it is a major step forward. A few upgrades are well worth it.



I like PV2012, too, that's why I'm using LR4, though it lost some flexibility over PV2010. And I'm aware of the fact that that more features need more computing power - with Word 6.0 you could type a letter w/ 256kb RAM, with Office 2010 you need 4GB to type the same letter, but with a much prettier interface  ... no, really, actually I worked as a C++ programmer for some time and looked into .NET, too.

The problem is that it's tempting to cut dev time by using more memory/cpu resources and not optimizing a program, and rigorous in-house testing is a major dev cost so why not let the user do it? And you'll see, LR4.2 and LR4.3 will improve further, even if it's based on lua and some features were added - an issue like slowdown the longer a program runs is simply sloppy programming imho. And there are major bugs left, e.g. for me copy/pasting dev settings always only applies to a part of the selected pictures and I have to do it multiple times.

That being said LR is pretty good at what it's doing, handling such a lot of pictures at this speed at all is more than I'd imagined was possible before I used LR.


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## CanonCollector (Jun 4, 2012)

I have an i7 quad core 3.8 machine with 3 really fast drives and the new LR 4.1 runs much slower than the 3.6 version. I have uninstalled it.


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## Alik Griffin (Sep 26, 2012)

I did a lot of research on this subject. Chances are your preferences got corrupted when you upgraded. Happens all the time to me when with Final Cut Pro as well. I've posted directions as well as a bunch of other things you can try to speed up lightroom here: http://alikgriffin.com/solutions-lightroom-running-slow

Good luck.


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## fotografiasi (Sep 26, 2012)

I read the adobe forums and did those things. they fix different problems that might occur. But what really helped me the most was:
[list type=decimal]
[*]for every job I have a different catalog (800 - 2000 photos)
[*]each time I open a catalog, in Library module, File -> Optimize Catalog
[*]in the Develop module, I minimize the histogram area from the top right - this seems to have the biggest impact on increasing the speed
[/list]


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## Marsu42 (Sep 26, 2012)

fotografiasi said:


> for every job I have a different catalog (800 - 2000 photos)
> each time I open a catalog, in Library module, File -> Optimize Catalog



Optimizing surely helps, but w/ different catalogs I find it annoying that there is now way to copy smart filter folders from one to the other (or is there a possibility?)


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## fotografiasi (Sep 26, 2012)

you would be much better with the search function in Bridge


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## CTJohn (Sep 26, 2012)

All aspects of Lightroom work fine for me, except when I switch from one image to another, the program says "Loading" and can take 5-10 seconds to become sharp. This also occurs when I zoom in on an image. I keep all my RAW files in CR2 format, could that be the problem?


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## RLPhoto (Sep 26, 2012)

I love LR 4.1. Its been fine on my machine and tweaks my 5D3 files nicely. Its from 2006 but has had basic upgrades since then.

C2D E6600 - 2.93ghz
4 GB 667 MHz RAM
Nvidia 660TI 3GB Card.
Dual monitors

Perhaps, your machine hasn't streamlined its services and background programs?


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## Marsu42 (Sep 26, 2012)

CTJohn said:


> I keep all my RAW files in CR2 format, could that be the problem?



Yes, that's it - the solution is convert them to dng and check the "embed fast-load data" option, that's specifically made for speeding up raw rendering. You can still embed cr2 in the dng if you never ever want to loose the original format, though of course required hd doubles. Personally, I like dng since all programs I ever looked at (except dxo) work with raw dng nowadays.


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## Chris Burch (Sep 26, 2012)

Marsu42 said:


> CTJohn said:
> 
> 
> > I keep all my RAW files in CR2 format, could that be the problem?
> ...



That's the first time I have heard anyone claim dng files allow LR to run faster. Can anyone else confirm that? I have never converted my CR2 files at all, so this would be a major shift for me.


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## wtlloyd (Sep 26, 2012)

There can be a couple bottlenecks.

At Edit>catalog settings>file handling select the highest preview size, high quality, never discard. This is assuming you are using a 24" or larger monitor.

In catalog settings>Metadata deselect "Automatically write changes into XMP" You'll have to periodically force this as a matter of good housekeeping, on the files you are working on, to keep the XMP current with the catalog.

At Edit>Preferences>File handling set your Camera Raw Cache to 20GB. This is not the same as your previews, and 20GB is ample. You might consider selecting "purge cache" at this time.

Pre-building 1:1 previews can help a lot. More than anything else you can do. There is still some re-rendering in Develop, but the initial view is more accurate. For 60,000 images from 8 to 21 megapixel cameras, my preview cache is around 200GB.

You can choose this on import, or by selecting all photos in the catalog, then Library>previews>render 1:1 previews. It's fairly quick on import and you can start ranking and editing files while the previews are being generated, anyway. To re-generate ALL your photo previews can take hours, best to let it grind away while you are doing something else. 

Re-optimize your catalog after.

Lightroom is far more CPU dependent than GPU. Additional memory benefits tail off rapidly after 8GB ram, unless you've got a dozen programs open at once, I'd guess. I typically only have Lightroom and CS6 running at the same time...


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## Chris Burch (Sep 26, 2012)

Thanks wtlloyd...I'll give those a try tonight.

Are there any efficiencies to be gained by using different hard drives for cache or photo storage. All of my photos are their own HDD so I could use that drive or my normal C: drive for cache and such. Thoughts?

I've been building 1:1 previews lately and I haven't seen much of a change. It's so slow that when I try to select a photo, I have to let the mouse hover over the photo for an extra few seconds because if I move the mouse away, it will select whatever I am hovering over at the time, up to 3-5 seconds after I clicked a mouse. That sounds trivial, but it's excrutiating when I am trying to cull through 2,000 images from a shoot.


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## Enthusiast (Sep 26, 2012)

Lightroom 4.1 is much faster than the Release Candidate but feels slower than 3.6. I doesn´t bring you forward to discuss this because the image quality increase a lot with the new process versions and that´s what we all want, isn´t it? 
Lightroom performance is related to two factors: 
1. CPU performance
This is relevant for rendering the previews and the export.
LR scales very very good in nearly all functions to all available cores and is much faster in that than most other programs. 
2. HD performance
Even the preview are on the HD and the catalog have to load back the data when you switch to next pic. 

I´m running LR 4.1 with 5 year old quadcore phenom but I use 2 SSDs since I upgraded to the Mark 3:
1. SSD: All programs
2. SSD: Lightroom catalogue and preview data

The SSD is fast enough to use the previews rendered in a 100% version. You can chose this in the import dialogue in the right upper corner. Wwhile zooming in, the CPU don´t have to render the image again. It´s just rendered once when you import the image. It takes more time to import, but you don´t need to spend this time in from of your PC and saves a lot of time while you work with. 

Catalog size is not the factor here. My main catalog is 45000 images and it´s not significantly slower than smaller catalogs I´m working with from time to time.


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## wtlloyd (Sep 27, 2012)

Hope it helps, Chris.

Regarding efficiencies, the best thing you can do is have the fastest internal HD or (far better) SSD you can afford. 

Enjoy this definitive article concerning program/cache/data location combinations in Lightroom:

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/blog/will-an-ssd-improve-adobe-lightroom-performance/

Regarding your second point, it sounds like some heavy action is occuring under the hood....possibly in Lightroom, which will automatically generate additional previews in the background or write XMP metadata to the sidecars as you work. I prefer to force all that addtional HD activity at one time, rather than take the performance hit. Or, you may have some system activity that is slowing Lightroom performance. Best to minimize programs that may make calls to the data or system drives. 
In win7, I have the cpu/mem "gadget" on my desktop - not to be taken seriously, but rather as an indicator when the hamsters are pantin'.....


Chris Burch said:


> Thanks wtlloyd...I'll give those a try tonight.
> 
> Are there any efficiencies to be gained by using different hard drives for cache or photo storage. All of my photos are their own HDD so I could use that drive or my normal C: drive for cache and such. Thoughts?
> 
> I've been building 1:1 previews lately and I haven't seen much of a change. It's so slow that when I try to select a photo, I have to let the mouse hover over the photo for an extra few seconds because if I move the mouse away, it will select whatever I am hovering over at the time, up to 3-5 seconds after I clicked a mouse. That sounds trivial, but it's excrutiating when I am trying to cull through 2,000 images from a shoot.


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## EvaCasado (Sep 30, 2012)

The only solution is to create a new catalog, since the upgrade it is the only fix that currently works.


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## RFreier (Oct 11, 2012)

Alik Griffin said:


> I did a lot of research on this subject. Chances are your preferences got corrupted when you upgraded. Happens all the time to me when with Final Cut Pro as well. I've posted directions as well as a bunch of other things you can try to speed up lightroom here: http://alikgriffin.com/solutions-lightroom-running-slow
> 
> Good luck.



I had to join this forum just so I could thank you for your post! I took a look at your link and decided to try the "Trash Your Preferences" suggestion first, because it seemed to make the most sense to me. I can't thank you enough because the issue I had with Lightroom 4.2 running slow for me was solved with that one suggestion! Thank you!
RFreier


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## crasher8 (Oct 11, 2012)

Upgrade to 4.2, it sure sped things up for me.


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## hhelmbold (Nov 11, 2012)

Marsu42 said:


> CTJohn said:
> 
> 
> > I keep all my RAW files in CR2 format, could that be the problem?
> ...



Sorry guys but I have to disagree... I know a lot of people preach converting to dng but I found that DNG IS the problem for Lightroom being so slow. I run an i7 processor with 24GB of RAM and when I convert to dng, I will click on the crop tool, wait 10 seconds... crop... wait 10 seconds... adjust a slider... wait 10 seconds etc etc. All my other catalogues are in CR2 format, so it made me think and I came across this article : http://www.foto-biz.com/Lightroom/The-case-against-dng

I kept the dng files I already worked on, deleted the rest from the catalogue and re-imported the CR2 files from the memory card... Suddenly Lightroom was working the way it is supposed to again. So my experience tells me that the dng file is indeed the problem.


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## Marsu42 (Nov 11, 2012)

hhelmbold said:


> So my experience tells me that the dng file is indeed the problem.



Did you use LR4's dng version with "Embed Fast Load Data"? That's exactly made to speed up rendering, though at the cost of a bit larger filesize - and still smaller than the original cr2.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Nov 11, 2012)

I've run tests on DNG converted files with my D800. The time to render them is faster, but not by much.


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## JMA (Jan 6, 2013)

I’ve only noticed LR 4.3 running painfully slow just recently, I’ve done heaps of searching but nothing people were recommending was fixing it, so I thought, what have I changed in the last month, then I remembered that I installed a new anti-virus, (bitdefender), where previously I was using AVG, so I uninstalled it, LR is now running perfect.
Not sure if this will work for everyone, but it might be worth a try.


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## Etienne (Sep 20, 2013)

My LR 4.4 is soooo sloowwww on import, that the program has become useless to me
I have about 50,000 images

Any suggestions?


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## Marsu42 (Sep 20, 2013)

Etienne said:


> My LR 4.4 is soooo sloowwww on import, that the program has become useless to me
> I have about 50,000 images Any suggestions?



Get LR5 which is speed-optimized - and I just split up my 60k image catalog into 2x 30k, big improvement, watch out in task manager (Windows) for lr using virtual memory ("commit size") which slows down lr to a crawl.


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## Etienne (Sep 20, 2013)

Marsu42 said:


> Etienne said:
> 
> 
> > My LR 4.4 is soooo sloowwww on import, that the program has become useless to me
> ...



Thanks!... what do youdo about the virtual memory? can you clear or delete it?


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## Marsu42 (Sep 20, 2013)

Etienne said:


> Thanks!... what do youdo about the virtual memory? can you clear or delete it?



If LR maxes out your "real" memory and swaps to the hard drive, you're sunk and the program slows to a crawl. Try these:

* upgrade your memory (unfortunately my laptop only accepts 4gb)
* split up your catalogs, good idea for bulk operations anyway 
* close background programs
* disable windows superfetch except for boot (use google for step-by-step) if your computer after some time sometimes slows down significantly for no apparent reason


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## mackguyver (Sep 20, 2013)

That's exactly why I gave up on Lightroom. It's SO SLOW. I use Photomechanic for previews, and then DxO or ACR in Photoshop to process.

If you just need a fast way to view your photos (pre-editing), check out the FastpictureViewer Codec Pack. It's $15-20 and integrates with Windows 7 & later. It runs in 64-bit and creates thumbnails from CR2 files insanely fast. It also generates full previews of CR2 files with Windows Picture Viewer extremely quickly as well. They have a free trial, which sold me on it.

http://www.fastpictureviewer.com/codecs/

Before Photomechanic (and back when DxO was also really slow), I would use it to select the photos I wanted to edit.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Sep 20, 2013)

Lightroom has always been fast for me. However, there are some ways to speed it up.
1. Put the catalog on a SSD, preferably the main drive. You can put your images on a separate drive. SSD's are now relatively cheap.

2. Make sure you have enough memory installed, 8GB is often not enough to edit large files efficiently. try to get 16GB or more installed.


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## terminatahx (Sep 21, 2013)

You need better hardware.

I run the intel i7 3770k overclocked to 4.5ghz, win7 x64, 16gb ram , dual evga gtx670s. This config let's me run above apps with amazing speed. Upgrading to ssd provided another huge speed benefit as well. You need cores, ram, ssd and fast gpus.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Sep 22, 2013)

Etienne said:


> My LR 4.4 is soooo sloowwww on import, that the program has become useless to me
> I have about 50,000 images
> 
> Any suggestions?


 
Can you determine if its lightroom, or a card issue? Try copying image files to a folder on lightroom , and then importing them from that location. If still slow, then lightroom or the computer needs work. The lightroom catalog is a first target when there are issues, so rebuild it first. 
Secondly, I'd create a new catalog for test purposes and import images into it to see how that works.

Then, I'd start checking my computer hardware, test the memory, test the hard drive, since one of those could be a issue. Be sure to install the latest video card drivers, they cause a huge amount of trouble.

Finally, reinstall Lightroom with a new catalog. if that fixes things, then switch to the old catalog and verify its working. Then remove the test catalogs.


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## Marsu42 (Sep 22, 2013)

terminatahx said:


> You need cores, ram, ssd and fast gpus.



And with the money left after these purchases, shoot with a Rebel 550d and a 50/1.8 :-> ... nothing against helping the economy, but for my money I'd first split large catalogs, allocate catalog & data on different disks, turn off sharpening/nr until exporting - lr5 also has smart previews to prevent working on the full resolution.


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## Etienne (Sep 22, 2013)

terminatahx said:


> You need better hardware.
> 
> I run the intel i7 3770k overclocked to 4.5ghz, win7 x64, 16gb ram , dual evga gtx670s. This config let's me run above apps with amazing speed. Upgrading to ssd provided another huge speed benefit as well. You need cores, ram, ssd and fast gpus.



I have an i7 920 processor, Windows 7 64bit, 12 GB RAM
Lightroom is the only thing that runs slowly now. It ran fine a year ago


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## Marsu42 (Sep 22, 2013)

Etienne said:


> I have an i7 920 processor, Windows 7 64bit, 12 GB RAM
> Lightroom is the only thing that runs slowly now. It ran fine a year ago



In that case, it also could be a bug - to debug: a) try disabling all plugins, b) use a new catalog (write all metadata to files, new catalog, read metadata)


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## Etienne (Sep 22, 2013)

Marsu42 said:


> terminatahx said:
> 
> 
> > You need cores, ram, ssd and fast gpus.
> ...


I will split the catalog .. I already do the other things you mention


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## Etienne (Sep 22, 2013)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> Etienne said:
> 
> 
> > My LR 4.4 is soooo sloowwww on import, that the program has become useless to me
> ...


It's not the card. Using Lexar 1000x with USB3 reader. It's very fast with just a windows explorer copy to the drive, but painfully slow using Lightroom import.

My PC is fast for everything else. Core i7 920, 12GB RAM, Video card drivers up to date, hard drives work great for everything else.

I'll split the catalog and see what happens.


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## Etienne (Sep 22, 2013)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> Lightroom has always been fast for me. However, there are some ways to speed it up.
> 1. Put the catalog on a SSD, preferably the main drive. You can put your images on a separate drive. SSD's are now relatively cheap.
> 
> 2. Make sure you have enough memory installed, 8GB is often not enough to edit large files efficiently. try to get 16GB or more installed.



I have 12 GB RAM
My catalog images are on several different drives, Maybe that slows things?
I may split the catalog


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## Marsu42 (Sep 22, 2013)

Etienne said:


> I have 12 GB RAM My catalog images are on several different drives, Maybe that slows things? I may split the catalog



How large is your catalog? Independently of the pictures in it, some plugins also dump a lot of data into the catalog. My personal pain threshold for catalogs is 1GB, of course ymmv with a faster system. Also 12GB of ram don't matter if LR doesn't load the whole catalog into memory but keeps reading it from hd, I don't know about that because I've only got 4GB of ram.


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## fegari (Sep 22, 2013)

In my experience LR4 is slow by design. It did improve a lot having very fast HDD for the raw storage and running LR, its catalog and having all previews in a fast SSD.

However, LR5 runs faster to the point I find its speed sufficient. Loading the develop takes 1 or 2sec max and almost no delay while browsing the catalog (30k pics)

So my advice is get the fastest SSD you can for LR and catalog, the fastest dedicated HDD for the photos and upgrade to LR5.

And finally, maybe it is just me but I find the CR2 raws load a bit faster than DNGs. I used to convert to DNG at import, not anymore.


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## Marsu42 (Sep 22, 2013)

fegari said:


> And finally, maybe it is just me but I find the CR2 raws load a bit faster than DNGs. I used to convert to DNG at import, not anymore.



You can improve dng rendering speed by enabling dng fast load data, it doesn't add much size but has a large impact, at least with my configuration.


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