I would like to address concerns recently voiced by our community of customers around Lightroom performance, as improving performance is our current top priority. We have a history, starting with our first public beta, of working with our customers to address workflow and feature needs, and we’d like to take that same approach regarding your performance concerns. We already understand many of the current pain points around GPU, import performance, certain editing tasks and review workflows and are investing heavily in improving those areas. Over the past year we’ve added numerous enhancements to address your performance concerns but we understand we will have a lot of work to do to meet your expectations. If you have feedback or would like to work with the Lightroom team on your most pressing issues, please fill out this survey.
Regards,
Tom Hogarty
Let’s put it this way.
I have a fully loaded 5k iMac state of the art delivered this week.
Using the latest version of LR, I can’t even navigate the film strip without encountering “loading” every 4-5 photos. Why? It’s just rendering jpeg. I’ve already generated all the previews, reduced the preview size and it’s not even in develop mode.
Meanwhile, Apple’s Photo app can scroll through thousands of photos with no loading.
What’s going on?
Let’s put it in perspective
I use a late 2013 6x 3.5 GHz Dual D700 Mac Pro and LR runs smooth and perfectly well – my images are on a NAS connected with 10 GbE and it feels like they were on a super fast local Raid.
The only real issue I have is that I don’t get the latest features in a new purchasable version of LR – I dislike the rental model and I’d prefer to be able to purchase software instead of renting it.
LR is running very well also on a 1st gen 5k iMAC and my current MacBook Pro 13″ mid 2017.
I am happy that Adobe is constantly optimizing it’s products and I bought lots of them over the years.
The rental model is not my favorite option. Before putting effort into performance optimization please make a new version available for purchase.
Are you running LR6 CC or the non CC version?
That ship has sailed, I’m pretty sure
Same. Fully maxed out specs on the new IMac 2017. 8GB AMD GPU. 64GB of Ram..and its the same performance of my 2013 MacBook Pro that I replaced.
Oh and all photos live on an SSD as well!
Seriously? I have a 2013 iMac that runs things adequately (wedding photog) and a 2016 MB Pro w/TB and that works equally as well. You have problems beyond LR and should maybe have someone with experience setting up workflows and equip help you out. A new loaded iMac should not perform anything like that.
Bloatware?
I am in the same boat…. For the life of me I can understand how other competing have virtually no lag. It is so frustrating! Meanwhile Aperture 3 still works flawlessy for me.
si la carga es lenta, 1-1 lentas,
What Gary said…^^^
To follow up with his question, I’d like to ask why a small program like Photo Mechanic can out perform the LR catalog (produced by a company the size and rep of Adobe)? I mean, surely you know how their program works – why not just do something similar? It just doesn’t seem like that kind of performance should take ten years to figure out… (develop module concerns are worth another thread entirely).
Soo true !!!!!!
Um, Photo Mechanic is a browser. A more apt comparison is with Bridge.
And the Lightroom Library Module is also a browser.
Albeit a browser based on previews that are generated to reflect the changes made to the image in the development module. Photo Mechanic, while a nifty program, will never be able to do that.
“Albeit a browser based on previews” which means Lightroom should be _faster_ than PhotoMechanic but it isn’t.
On my machine it’s as quick as PM. Startup might take half a minute more but that’s it. It’s preview generation that takes a while. Obviously people with different hardware configs have different problems. I don’t recognize a lot of the stuff I read on this page but it makes me rethink the wisdom of upgrading to a new machine and/or the wisdom of continuing using LR…
I understand that browsing a 1:1 preview might take longer after making changes in the development module. However, building those 1:1 previews in the first place shouldn’t take forever on a top-level machine. And going from the Fit view to 1:1 before even moving to the development module, it shouldn’t take several seconds for the image to snap into sharp focus.
Lightroom Library Module is not a browser. Perhaps it should be
Thanks Tom!
Filling out the survey now. I experienced a catastrophic slowdown in LR in recent months. I did a little documentation here which I think would help develop the picture:
https://forums.adobe.com/message/9636250#9636250
Its not pain points, the program is unusable. I run two very different machines and it does not work on either one very well.
System 1
Windows 7, AMD 8350 8C, Radeon RX 460, 32GB RAM, SSD
System 2
Windows 10, Intel i7, Nvidia 635M, 16GB RAM, SSD.
The develop and library modules are just useless with the current performance
i have a 10 core intel and a 8 core ryzen 7.
the intel has 64GB ram the amd 32GB ( i do 3d graphics so i need much ram).
and honestly it is a joke how slow lightroom runs on these systems.
the GPU part is total crap. i have a dual 1080 GTX setup and i have to disable GPU support to make lightroom usable.
the guys who coded the GPU support should be fired. they are incompetent.. sorry but it´s the truth.
look at some other programs and what people can doe with openCL or cuda.
^^Like.
Also, how are you enjoying the Ryzen?
I have a Ryzen 1700 too with M.2 NVMe SSD where the catalogue lives. Pictures on a fact large SSD.
Ryzen is fast: for instance exports are really fast. But LR editing is still relatively slow on this brand new machine. Still brushing or cropping and the mouse will lag for seconds. Unacceptable.
The Nvidia 1060 doesn’t seem to help much.
LR isn’t optimized for more than four cores…
Lightroom isn’t optimized for anything period. Thats the problem!
+1
When LR came out I was happy to see a newly built app using the latest technology.
However, now the catalog concept just seems outdated. I actually know a photographer who uses Bridge because in some ways, it is faster.
At this point I think that LR will only get marginally faster until Adobe changes the underlying technology. How about using SQL? I hear it’s pretty fast and well tested.
All that Adobe will do is overuse your machine’s resources to perform the same tasks that could be done faster with better technology.
Hi guys,
I’ve been using LR for building large amounts of panoramas and HDR images. My machine is reasonably fast with a 6700k i7, 16gb DDR4 RAM and a GTX970, the problem is that after about 15 minutes of this the process slows ridiculously and I have to exit LR and restart it to dramatically increase the speed, I know I’m not the only one having this problem.
The biggest thing we need is for these processes to queue rather than working on multiple at the same time and rendering the machine completely useless.
Thanks,
Brenten 🙂
^^ Anyone running any type of monitor like ActivityMonitor on the Mac can see it with their own two eyes as LR eats CPU for no purpose. But Adobe is just now becoming aware that there might be Lightroom performance issues. Guess this proves none of their “programmers” bother to test it, much less use it themselves.
Both LR and Photoshop have memory leaks 🙁
I also work a lot with panoramas and HDR. When doing that – restarting lightroom every 10 minutes is necessary to keep it running at an acceptable speed – otherwise it just grinds to a halt. Creating the 2nd or 3rd panorama takes 4-5 times as long as the first one. This can’t be anything other than errors in Lightroom memory handling or Lightroom not cleaning up after previous operations. It is 100% repeatable and completely measurable and the first panorama performance is about acceptable – so profiling this, understanding it and fixing it should be a simple task… someone just needs to do it.
One thing which makes this 100 times more frustrating is the lack of a batch processing option for HDR. If I have a folder with 999 image files, representing 333 bracketed image sets, then I have to select three images and start the HDR process 333 separate times. With the slooooooow performance of Lightroom that makes for a huge amount of my time doing sequential manual trivial operations and waiting, waiting, waiting. I should be able to point lightroom at the folder and say “these are in brackets of three, go make the HDR’s” and then go do something else while Lightroom works programatically through it.
When you combine the performance issue (progressively slower HDR + panorama operations) and the inefficient workflow issue (no batch processing / automation) then the overall productivity hit is ENORMOUS. I spent 13 hours in front of the computer making HDR’s the other day… it could have been a couple of clicks and leave it running… a massive saving with a fairly simple feature.
Stacking > Auto-stack by capture time
I second this. The lack of HDR automation is a productivity killer. And, I can only process 3 HDR sets at a time (no queueing) without the cpu grinding to a halt. And, I have to constantly re-start to keep performance up. I am getting ready to upgrade to a new 2017 iMac, but I am wondering if it will do anything for LR performance. I make my living at this, and the time I have to spend spoon-feeding Lightroom while processing HDR is ridiculous for a professional photo app.
Oh, and Nathan, Autostack is fine for sorting the images, but does nothing for automating or speeding up the HDR creation process. It is still the same slog.
Tried to use lightroom on the following machine:
– 2x Hexacore Intel Xeon CPUs, HT enabled, 3.4 GHz each
– 48GB of RAM
– AMD FirePro R5000
– Configured RAID0 with two disk drives by a HP SmartArray 5i Controller, fully equipped with RAM
– Windows 7 Pro x64 at that time
And in comparison to my usual workflow (sorting out via Bridge, processing via CameraRAW) it is unbelievable slow. The very hughe pain points why I am not using Lightroom is the fixed database concept (there are SO many databases out there, that are performing very well on network shares) and the fact, that the import alone take longer time as I fly it through with Bridge and process it via CameraRAW.
Sadly, Lightroom seems to use 4 of the 12 Cores only and seems to cut the useage of RAM at 16GB…maybe that, including a better database, that performs well would remind my decision, but at the moment…I see no room for a switch to Lightroom because I want not to wait HOURS until Lightroom gets the import of roughly 2500 photos done. That is in Bridge very much quicker…
Cheers,
Stephan
Stephen,
While the system sounds cool… you are hampering yourself with the video card. 2gig (?).
what monitor are you running?
Just leave everything as it is – this will improve the market chance for any other photo library/editing solution. And those won’t be only faster – those will support multi-device library on local NAS Storage, parallel editing and better support for unusual RAW Files like Panasonic.
Just my 2 cents.
Cheers, oli
Adobe, please test importing and editing 300+ images at the same time. Apply corrections to all of them then visit each in turn to crop it and add acircular filter fot vignetting. This is whst sport photographer do and where LR slows down. Work around is to restart LR
300? Never mind that, bring it right up to a wedding-sized 2000-5000 images. If Lightroom is meant to be a work horse, give it a real work load!
+1
I found a work around to this. Copy your images directly to your Hard Disk. Then from Lightroom, instead of “import” use the “Add” function. Copying directly into your hard disk is a lot faster than the import function basically. The “Add” function is merely a few seconds unless you have it build smart previews as well. That will depend on your CPU.
Yes, I second this.
Import from one 64GB card, then have conversion to DNG and preview build running.
It would be nice to import the next card while doing this, but alas.
Work on images already in the library besides doing this.
The other thing I noticed, that saving and optimiing the catalog after a big import (like 5000 pics) is a must (but of course that could be just me thinking it helps).
Basically all we need is an optional “less precision/draft” mode for editing and browsing. Every time RAW photo is edited in Develop module, the performance is much worse than editing JPG or other bitmap file – I imagine because it always goes to the data source to compute and show the exact perfect final results when making changes, when you brush, etc. Which is great, when you need it, but most times you don’t.
The “Use smart previews instead of originals for image editing” was the right step toward better performance, but it stil have drawbacks (like when you decide to zoom in develop, and also you need to generate those previews, and is probably still edited the same way original RAW is), but it’s still not the definitive answer.
When the RAW is loaded into the develop module, just allow us to choose “draft” quality, apply at least the time consuming operations like Noise Reduction, Sharpening, Lens Distortion ONCE when they are modified, and let us work faster with simplified “unprecise” bitmap – so when I use brush for instance, don’t compute all the previous steps all over again, just the new changes. And if I need to see the perfect result of one of many photos right away, I’ll just switch a button for a while or export it – it’s that simple.
And I forgot – better multicore optimization for as many operations as possible. The performace per one cpu core has been rising very slowly for years now and the Develop “utilization limit” is still arounf around 2-4 cores only.
One thing I have noticed in develop module is when you use previous to apply the same adjustments to the next photo it works great in most cases but an improvement could be made when you have a sequence of images. Example: I am a wedding photographer so I might take 10 images of a bride stood next to a window. The first image is a little dark and so I brighten it, straighten it and do a slight crop for instance. The next photo needs the same changes so I just click previous and the changes copy over, same on the next photo, great. The issue comes when on the next photo the bride has her eyes closed so I delete that image. I go to the next photo and her eyes are open so I just want to copy the changes but now when I press previous the changes don’t copy over (obviously because the previous photo was deleted) So now I have to click back to the last photo I did the development changes to, then click back to the photo I was on and then press previous!! Surely you can make a software change that if the last photo was deleted and I press previous to make the same changes that means I am referring to the last photo that had devilment changes.
Thanks
http://www.damianburcher.com
I find when using previous that I have to give a pause before pressing th button as otherwise LR seems to miss the command
Yes that too!
Same
+1
You can also copy the changes to your clipboard and then just paste them. (I know not entirely the same thing, and you have to keep pressing the key command for copy if you adjust something in a series).
why don’t you just copy the adjustments? With shift-command C, select what to copy, then shift-command V you can paste them as many times as you want, disregarding any in-between operations
Oh, now I Understood what you said… you where using a command I had no idea existed. I learned something!
Anyway, I got a new 2017 iMac, Lightroom is too slow for this new computer, it runs the same as my 2011 iMac. I understand that now I have a retina screen, but, hey, come on.
I thought, only my machine is slow…
My main painpoints are the previews. Every view on the (already proccessed) preview picture costs 2-3 seconds. Way too long! With a sharpness control of sometimes more than a thousand pictures for one engagement I do this with Irfanview meanwhile. As I am also shooting JPGs parallel, I would like to use (a small copy of) them as the initial catalog thumbs..
Second point is the repair brush. With that slow speed it is really useless and even in 100% opacity ist does not fully cover the areas I painted.
Kind regards,
Oliver
I agree – the previews are really slowing me down – for pictures I’ve already recently edited. Need to generate previews of recent shoots (at least) in background so they are available and don’t slow things down.
Hello,
same problems here. I invested in an HP Z620 Workstation with an Dual XEON setup and 64GB RAM. 2x Intel Xeon 2690v2 CPUs with 10x 3 GHz per CPU. The Catalogue is stored on an Samsung PCIe-SSD an i have 2x Nvidia GTX 1070 with 8GB RAM.
The Performance is horrible, import and export is not so necessary for me. That can take time, but when i start to sort out the pictures i have to wait. I start in Catalouge mode an first sort out the pictures, with “X” and stars.
I’m not in develop mode and the waiting time after mark an picture and sroll to the next one is frustrating. I generate SMART previews and 1:1 previews but the performance is still very poor.
I hope that Adobe will fix these issues, i’m not happy with these lags. I would understand these lags on an old workstation. My Z620 cost 5K and is a beast – lightroom has to handle this power.
I took the survey, and noticed the question “what version of Lightroom are you using” only had choices in the 6.x range, so I put “I don’t know” and added 2015.10.1 to the comments.
Glad to see you are re-thinking the performance. After 10+ years of LR, the program is both an inextricable part of my daily life, as well as an occasionally maddening object of my ire. Performance hasn’t improved significantly since about version 4, despite my migration to newer and faster systems. I still get the “loading” wheel all the time browsing in full screen, even when 1:1 previews are available.
2015.x versions are 6.x versions.
If Adobe wanted to fix LR they would have.
Aren’t they expressly saying they’re fixing it now?
Even if they do, and there’s no proof yet that they will actually do anything, what’s their excuse for the last 5 years when they knew it was dog and did nothing?
They’ve asked for this kind of feedback before. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting to see a patch that seriously addresses any of this stuff any time soon.
lol you believe them? This is a cash cow for them and the sheep keep paying monthly rental fees. Unless you stop paying, they won’t make any changes.
I recently had reason to do a search for images, which yielded a find of approx. 1500 out of 80,000. I started to scroll down in grid view …… and after a screen or two it became unusable…… the delay to refresh the small thumbs was so painful. Normally, I have an optimised process when I import a batch of new images, generate appropriate previews, etc., which means that I do not suffer unduly during the initial selection and develop session.
Leaving the screen for 5 or 10 mins and returning made no (apparent) difference
I can understand people getting really frustrated.
I do not understand why Adobe do not allow the user decide on their preferred grid view image size and then keep a current version of that thumbnail image (ie all images in the catalog) to allow high performance of all library grid / film strip activity. I presume PhotoMechanic works on such a basis. When a user adjusts the thumbnail image size I assume all thumbnails for all my 80,000 images need to be adjusted or re-rendered at some point. I would gladly sacrifice the convenience of adjusting the grid view image size for better screen performance. If I then manually change the grid image size then I know to expect a performance hit, but should have a user friendly option to trigger this batch process at a time of my choosing.
I really sense Adobe is only giving lip service to performance issues as having such fundamental issues into what should be a mature product is hard to comprehend.
I am deferring any upgrade of my own hardware at this stage as I am hoping improvements on handling multiple cores, etc.. will arrive and make my decisions on both CPU and / or video card easier to make.
The MAP Module is still unusable and keeps flashing “map offline” This is much more annoying than all the other performance Problems!!! So, please adobe, take 100 programmers to fix that in 3 days !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think ONE good programmer would be sufficient. Their problem to this point is the how poor their programmers are.
I completely agree Philip. All of this nonsense about “send me your full machine specs”, removing/adding drivers, disable gpu, set cpu affinity, clearing out caches, resetting preferences etc etc. The only variable that needs to be isolated is LR version. Change the version, and performance drops…go figure from there!
A handful of excellent programmers with the correct tools and mandate should be able to fix this. It does not need to be rebuilt, just fixed.
They are clearly not regression testing.
Yeah, Lightrooms performance hurts like pain in the ass currently. Own a GTX1070, Intel i7 6700 @ 4GHz with 32Gig RAM. So noone can tell me, that this isn’t enough, sorry. I even had to deactivate graphic computing in lighroom so that image thumbnails are working again. Drivers are all up2date.
I can’t understand whats going on with Lightroom.
About your “how often” do you use LR:
There are week where I’m too busy doing other things so, other weeks I use it daily. That question might need rephrasing.
Otherwise: Good you’re checking on the performance needs! As LR is a tool to process loads of pictures, performance is the #1 topic
Lightroom is way too slow to use as a professional photographer anymore. Flipping through photos while culling is extremely slow. Even amateur photo editing software like Apple Photos allows me to browse my photos quickly. Also, pro programs like Photo Mechanic are much quicker.
I have been hoping that the reason Lightroom has seen very few updates in the last year was because the team was secretly working on a complete re-write so it’d be faster than ever. This survey makes me wonder if actually Adobe is just now actually looking at the problem.
It seems that in 2017, Adobe has really only focused on integrating Adobe stock into the products. Haven’t seen much else.
Jim, I’m in the exact same place you are. Some lag on Develop renderings, etc, I get, but I should be able to flip through my pictures in Library as fast as I can physically go – just like other programs.
I’m also very worried that this survey is just coming out now when I had assumed they had been working on a re-write already for a few months. Frankly it seems like few engineering resources have been allocated to LR and what they had, they threw at LR Mobile which is the only place there has been action lately. Sadly that may not change until they see their subscriber numbers start to fall. Regardless I have filled out the survey and hopefully something will come of it.
Adobe has known about Lightroom slowness for years. I’ve talked about it for 2.5 years on my show, I’m sure you have as well. My guess is that a rewritten or otherwise sped up Lightroom has been in the works and they’re seeking feedback to make sure everything is covered. My guess is we’ll see a speedier Lightroom in the near future.
Took the survey and also choose don’t know for version. CC not listed.
Adobe, thank you for taking an interest in the performance problems that we experience with Lightroom. I filled out the survey and gave as much detail as possible in the essay portion, including my configuration and actions I have taken to try to mitigate the massive slowdowns that I experience editing in D mode.
Lack of communication on this matter from Adobe has made a frustrating situation vastly more frustrating. Please keep us posted on your progress with this issue, even if it looks like it may take some time to resolve. Reach out to use for feedback whenever it might help.
Would echo Gary Fung’s comments. Have a brand-new 2017 27″ 5k iMac; top i7, 48Gb ram TB SSD.
Photomechanic flies through photos, previewing/selecting etc.
LR (latest CC) is exceptionally slow.
Working on RAW files from Nikon D750’s and Fuji XT-2’s, compressed RAWs normally. Slow to load, slow to render, slow to preview, slow to edit.
Just not good enough any more…
Wondering why the LR Catalog takes up so much space. I stopped using LR and just edit in PS because of that. I discovered so much of my 500g HD was being eaten up by the LR catalog. Is there a fix to that?
Were the GB in the LRCAT file itself? Or were the GB in the Preview Folders?
For comparison I have a 370,000 image catalog that weights in at about 10GB. The entire LR Directory is about 250 GB including Previews and Smart Previews.
Managing your Preview files (both size and longevity on disk) could go a long way toward preserving precious hard drive space.
One thing I can see from all the comments is that the concept of a non-destructive editing environment is not fully understood by most folks. One solution would be to allow us to save a ‘draft’ to disk with perhaps a keep for x days option PER IMAGE. One option could be to keep forever. This would be a classic trade off of space (HDD/SDD) for time (CPU). Of course, the database still has all the individual steps to create the draft so it can be re-edited.
Another concept hinted at here is a new import preview of very low quality for doing the first pass cull.
An intelligently designed program wouldn’t require one to have save “drafts” or decide on 4 or 5 different types of previews. Most applications have caches that they use to improve their performance. In the case of LR, we have a app that exposes the cache issues to the user, making them decide what do, and _still_ performs poorly. Worst of both worlds.
BTW you can save Snapshots already that do what you are asking for.
I just filled out the form and I am glad attention is paid to performance. The performance is at the moment for many users very unsatisfactory, to put it mildly.
The profits Adobe makes are sky-high and I am paying 10 euro per month for using LR and PS. But for the last 6 months I haven’t seen any significant improvements in LR. And that is really bugging me. Anyone in software development knows that performance is a key issue for mature software. And it just doesn’t feel good that only now attention is paid to performance, when it is at a level that it makes you want to switch to another program.
I can’t use LR for my initial culling; it’s just too slow. I’ve taken to doing my initial cull and copy from SD card to HD with RawFastViewer. Only after I’ve got it down to a manageable number of photos do I launch LR and start the import and leave for a while to let it build previews. Doing it this way lets me get the initial excitement of seeing the raw files without the pain of waiting for LR to do its thing. I highly recommend RawFastViewer in concert with LR.
I hear you Mat, I am using Irfanview for the same thing. No matter how slow or outdated a laptop I was using, it always loads of photos quicker than LR on a big badasss workstation.
How about we all downgrade back to LR5 since all of the new “features” are not new?
If you want to create new features, work with Apple, Microsoft & Wacom and develop a touch-UI that will help put the “pro” in apple’s ipad pro. Otherwise, just keep updating LR with new camera raw settings.
Lightroom is my favorite photo cataloging solution. However, the raw processing engine is inferior to at least one other product, the performance (read: responsiveness) is absolutely abhorrent on newer hardware in both Library and Develop modules, and I’m struggling to justify a subscription when the product seems to be languishing in the “everything is fine, why change things” cycle of development.
Performance. Is. Awful. I love the program, but I’m switching to a competitor because I have work that needs to be done. You can still get me back if you take these complaints seriously. Compete! Please!
I am a bit (very) concerned about the “recently voiced” wording.
If you think it’s been recently voiced, then where were you the past few years?
Seriously, blogs have been written, videos have been made over and over again on how to improve the sluggish performance of Lr.
And you’ve just recently heard about that? That`s like admitting you’ve been sleeping the whole time. Come on…It’s one thing to sleep on the job but don’t laugh on our face as well.
Fair point. We’ve always been attentive to performance and customer concerns and many of the “6.x” dot releases include efforts to improve performance. The “recent” trend I’ve noticed is the sentiment that Adobe isn’t listening to those concerns. We are listening and we are working on improvements.
Thanks for answering Tom!
Glad to read you’re indeed working on improvements. The fact that multiple other applications are much faster than Lr proves it’s possible. And with profit records Adobe is making these days, there is no reason whatsoever you can’t make it happen 🙂
Thanks!
Don’t pretend like you actually care about LR6 users. You knew full well Dehaze was coming down the pipe and purposefully left it out LR6 and released to to CC a few weeks later in order to strong-arm people to rent their software for hundreds of dollars more a year. You should be ashamed.
List your targeted improvements in your release notes so people see the volume of them, rather than just customer reported fixes.
Tom, I think part of the sentiment of “Adobe isn’t listening” is left over from the interface rewrite which broke workflow for so many people. Users kept repeating that stability and performance were an issue. Instead of focusing on those problems, it seemed like Adobe put a lot of resources into an interface rewrite that hardcore users rejected and LR Mobile enhancements. It seems like many of the stability issues are being addressed (thank you), and hopefully future releases will make better use of more cores. I think hardcore/power/professional (whatever you want to call us) users want some reassurance that LR isn’t being converted/relegated to a “consumer” level product.
I have the impression that you are not taking advantage of the latest simd instructions (AVX512) nor high core counts (8+)? This is strange to me. Most heavy signal processing should easily be sped up by 4x by having 2-3 experts doing intrinsics/assembler and some compiler wrestling in that area. So why not?
He means we’ve been getting loud in the bug forums and they finally decided to acknowledge it in this section to get us out of there.
Also, here is one of the reddit threads for additional complaints and comments.
https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/6mkcua/adobe_is_finally_open_to_hearing_issues_regarding/
LOL.. you know for YEARS where the issues are.
you don´t have to take a survey for it.
the adobe support forum is FULL with DETAILED COMPLAINS.
the GPU part is just badly coded.
you need to rewrite great parts of your program. a bandaid here and there will not fix anything.
Gosh. Am I the only one who thinks LR is running fine? I’m on a 3 year old HP machine running Windows 10 and have noticed no slowdown over the last three years. I use the LRCC version and, after initla scepticism, I love it 🙂
Let me guess, 16mpix photos and 1920×1080 screen?
Until march I used a canon 400D. 10 Mpix and a 1920×1080 and lightroom was already very slow in the library module…. not to mention the develop module…
So Tom Bootyman (fake name? Bootyman?) must be working with even lower Mpx files and lower resolution for sure ;D
Somehow I can’t fire up the survey, something about safari not being able to reach the surveymonkey server.
Anyhow. When I used LR professionally (I quit my event photography business a year ago because of other plans / adventure out of my home country) my only objection to LR’s speed was importing / culling. I always used PhotoMechanic for culling and imported the remainder of the images into LR. And I still do that for personal shoots. An option to quickly import everything without preview generation, or being able to cull effectively during the import process would be great (you know, the opposite of trying to dumb it all down… you nearly lost me there).
That said, the rest of the program still whistles along. That’s on a 7 year old Macbook Pro with a whopping 8 Gb of RAM. At least, for my 22mp Canon raw’s it does. The program slows down considerably when I use a Fujifilm camera like an X100F. There’s some room for improvement there, compared to the Canon handling. Obviously on a machine this old I don’t try to use 50mp files.
By the way, I think LR 6 is getting a bit long in the tooth. A new version, with a new image rendering process, would be welcome. More sharpness, better out of the box images, less noise. Basically what Capture One does.
I honestly don’t see how adobe can fix this without building a few things from scratch. Starting with whatever they use to build the UI.
I honestly suggest they’d start testing on small devices, you can watch the various failure modes like a slideshow sometimes (try a 8GB surface pro with a largeish catalog).
Also, what’s with the RAM obsession? I’ve never seen my system use more than 7gig, when only Lightroom is running.
I am willing to wait up to a point, but it’s getting harder. Capture one is not quite there yet, But it’s getting tempting.
Oh, and would really like them to un-screw mobile/cloud. Cloud is ever unreliable these days, and the interface for mobile has been getting worse with each revision. (Still no manual Denoise? Can’t review and edit at the same time? Pictures stick in weird formats?)
Agree with pretty much everything you said. They should be able to load the entire database into RAM and it still wouldn’t use it all. Their preview system has something fundamentally wrong about it given all the problems. Don’t care about cloud or mobile. Just want a non-destructive photo editor that doesn’t suck.
I think they use a boat load of LUA code. They need some decent performance engineers on this.
What does LUA stand for?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)
Thank you!
After testing a new update, I always rolled back to 2015.1.1 because the library module became unusable slow. I’m considering stopping the subscription as I can’t use the new features without having extremely slow managing options. However, the editing works acceptable for me on my hardware (Version 2015.1.1, never tested it on newer versions as I rolled back after the library module was too unusable).
And another point: Please consider making a linux version. I switched to windows because of how good LR was back then but I don’t like the idea to use the spyware win10. Macbook pros got too expensive with the last models thus it’ll be a hard decission in a few years and would really appreciate to have the best option available if MS continious the way they’re doing.
If CC is the only model going forward or they do what they did with Standalone version 6 where they added dehaze a few weeks after its release and left it out of the standalone version, this is all a moot point. Even if I hae to use Nikon’s own NX software to individually edit each photo or invest in Capture One Pro and start from scratch with a new system, I will do that before I subscribe to CC. It’s not going to happen Adobe.
CC is for people who NEED the latest Photoshop and don’t have the funds to pay $700 up front but I only need Lightroom and have already invested in the standalone product and paid for upgrades twice now. The math for CC is not in my favor and you’re not going to squeeze thousands of dollars from me and hold my photos hostage if I don’t pay up in the future.
I recently tried the latest trial of CC to see what I was missing and it turned out to be very little except for bloatware. Why would I rent a software that stays the same for 5 years with small added features here or there?
Adobe, nice to see you are finaly doing something other than collecting our money once a month. I’m already looking an alternatives for Lightroom. Better get that speed back or you will lost my money. You don’t have many chances any more.
What are they doing? They are just in a forum saying “we’re listening”. They didn’t say they were actually doing anything, much less proving it by releasing an improved version.
Move to Capture One Pro. It’s what a lot of pros use now days.
I moved to Capture One Pro, too. Several times. I keep moving back to Lightroom, warts and all. I just go get a nice nap during imports.
I may be alone on this, but I’m looking for Adobe to hit a home run with the next major version.
While you’re making improvements, how about bringing the catalog database into the modern age. Moving the catalog into the cloud would make a lot of sense, granted you would need to have an off line option for those who work disconnected. Having it in the cloud would eliminate needing to back it up, and worries about it being accidentally deleted.
For a model of how this should work, look at how Outlook and Exchange have worked for years. The content is on the Exchange server in the cloud or on premises, but the Outlook program accesses a locally cached copy that reduces bandwidth and improves performance. No one backs up the Outlook local cache, if needed its recreated from the server. It can also be used on multiple computers.
If you’re going to do that, create a web interface or API that allows third party tools to access it and extend what LR can do.
Adobe please whatever you do… do not put the catalogue into the cloud (that’s the day I leave for good). Privacy set aside cloud performance, both internet connection and speed dependant vs ssd and now m.2 speeds locally is the most ridiculous idea ever! Especially when we are here now talking about performance issues. Sure a cloud ‘option’ for catalogue backup isn’t a bad idea for those that do not have any sort of robust local backup redundancy or plan. Robert, outlook in the cloud is not faster its just convenient for multiple devices and a handful of new emails to deal with a a time. Try at once 500 new emails with attachments over a slow connection.
A big +1 to OhDear. I built a dilithium-powered PC for going faster, not slower.
I use a Nikon D750 and shoot only in RAW (.NEF) format – I load the photos from my hard drive and import them into LR 2017CC the import and preview build is fine – I usually start it and go do something else. When I switch over to the Develop module, I begin by adjusting one photo then sync settings across a range of photos that are in the same location, same light, etc. The second adjustment after the first sync produces noticeable degradation in performance and it goes south from there – even if I give the sync process 20 minutes to be propagate. I am quite dissatisfied with the inefficiency that Lightroom has brought to my business! I have 2 PC’s both are i7 quad core with 24gb of RAM – I hope you can fix this soon!
If you have any type of performance monitor, maybe Task Manager, run it and watch when you get to that point. You’ll see LR start to consume CPU every 2-3 seconds doing nothing at all. It will do that until you quit and restart. In the meantime all other threads become jerky as they are starved by the runaway process that is doing nothing.
It took Adobe only 5 years to realize that LR performance is driving insane every photographer. I have latest PC with 64Mb of RAW and every time I need to use LR I close all applications, restart PC and shut down all services line backup. This is the only way I can work. I feel like running Photoshop 3.5 on 6Mb of RAM 20 years ago.
Actually, I wish LR would use MORE of my 64GB of RAM. It never goes above 7GB. That seems like a potential bottleneck to me.
+1
adobe only started to say they vould address performance issue when people started to migrate to other similar programs.
I’m blown away by two things…
1) you claim the backlash (yes, that’s an appropriate word if one has been paying attention) has been “recent”… And
2) you didn’t notice that it was a problem yourselves!?
I just spent $1500 on an almost-top of the line PC custom built for editing and it’s barely faster than the 6 year old middle of the road (when purchased) pc when performing identical tasks. I can’t imagine the number of people like me who have upgraded their pc to better handle images when it was Adobe’s software which was the problem the entire time. HUGE waste of money. Thanks, Adobe.
Ha! People are paying $120 annually to *rent* a piece of software that’s limping along. Vote with your money and use a different app. And this has been going forever.
If all you use is Lightroom and occasionally use photoshop, it’d be much cheaper to buy LR outright and just pay $79 every 2 or 3 years to upgrade. Adobe knows this too and that’s why they’re waiting so long between updates to LR6 and leaving out features on purpose. Why would they change if people are this bad in math?
Finally an acceptance of this ongoing performance issue. It has been infuriating to watch Adobe blame users on the forums, blaming their hardware config and drivers etc. The only common variable among the complaints, is upgrading Lightroom! There are of course some basic steps that need to be taken by some users, however a significant number of forum posts are from savvy users who have taken these steps and are looking for a cure to bad code (there is none, other than Adobe fixing the darn code).
Please encourage your programmers to include performance unit tests in the software build (cross platform), so you can prevent slow code getting back in to the system. You need decent regression tests, and beta testing, too. A slow program should be considered a broken program.
You may have retained users through this degradation, but you have not retained the favor or trust of your user base. If C1 can make a killer migration path, things could go bad very quickly for LR!
Collect the data, then hire the best performance engineers you can, and get it fixed!
How utterly pointless!
Adobe, don’t you already know there are performance issues with LR? Don’t you read your own forums on your own website? What could you possibly learn from this statistically useless survey that you don’t already know?
I think Adobe wants to prioritize the biggest three pain points, then work their way down.
FINALLY! Can’t wait to see what improvements you can achieve.
It’s remarkable and a testament to the severity of Lightroom’s performance, especially since so many of us found this blog as quickly as we did through the frustrating exercise of Googling this issue.
Image how truly widespread this issue for all those that haven’t found this post yet.
— Angry Adobe CC user with a high-end PC
I think my biggest complaint is that LR seems to need to re-render every single image every time I view them. Which is stupid. I’ve already got previews created. What’s the point of creating previews on import if the app isn’t going to use them to keep things quick? This is what makes everything seem slow to me.
That is my #1 complaint. And this is on a PC with 64GB of RAM, an overclocked K-series Intel CPU with 6 cores/12 threads, and a Samsung 960 PRO M.2 SSD. When I moved to this PC from my old desktop, boot times sped up to as fast as three seconds, and everything (except Adobe apps) opens in a blink. Yet LR performance didn’t improve even one percent.
For God’s sake update LR 6 Non-CC. Sooner or later even people who are bad in math and rent their software are going to figure out it’s cheaper to buy Standalone Capture One Pro and have faster speed.
2013 Mac Pro 8 core 64gb of ram fire core d700. Also running 2015 maxed MacBook Pro. This isn’t new. It’s been about 8 months since the speed has been painful. I’m glad it’s being looked into but for the amount of accounts we pay for and the extra time we are spending on workflow daily…. it’s costing us at least an hour a day per editor.
Other suggestions are welcome!
The reality is.. LR is forever going to be a pathetically slow POS until Adobe does what they should have done long ago.. LR need a full rework. Adobe Air is a pig. Adobe needs to build LR with a native MacOS core and a separate Windows native core. Adobe will never run right until they build LR for native Mac. ANYTHING running Air is a slow POS. Adobe should be embarrassed and ashamed to be perfectly honest. DO IT RIGHT ADOBE..
To feel shame requires a conscience. Corporations don’t have one.
I have the latest version of LR 6 non-cc, and it takes forever just to start up. I’m running a Toshiba satellite laptop with Win 7, 4ghz Pentium and 8gb RAM. 3-5 minutes just for the program to start is beyond unacceptable.
The reason i don’t like Lightroom, from a UX point of view, specially the import module,
And speed wise, i find myself using Camera Raw in Photoshop.
Maybe it needs a modern look, update and refresh, from the ground up?
Well, I’m a sports photographer. So a typical shoot for me is about 4,000 images. I shoot Motorsports, so I’ll shoot a race, then I have to rush into the media centre, import the files, cull, edit the pics and upload. I’f I’m lucky i get 40 minutes to process 1,000 – 2,000 images per session depending on the event.
Lr can’t cope with that number, it would take an hour just to import those images, and to cull them with a 5 second render time per image, i’d need a week, not 40 minutes.
So I use PhotoMechanic to import, cull and caption – i then import the picks and edit in Lr. That works, but I’d rather Lr work properly to be honest.
I don’t have too much issue with editing performance, but it could improve.
+1
i have the same workflow. photomechanic is used to sort/cull images, and the ones i will edit gets imported in lr for editing.
the big problem for me is that develop module is slow when i do not check “use smart previews”, and when i use smart previews the picture is slightly different in terms of colors, contrast and banding witch shows when i use smart preview but not in the final export picture or when smart preview is not used
John,
The frustration with sluggish culling, and importing speed has been known for MANY years. IMO, it’s the low hanging fruit.
For culling, provide your customers, the option of using the embedded jpeg in raw files. Optionally defer rendering of the original raw files, until after the initial culling is done. The Lightroom development team already knows this is a customer need. So, sacrifice the purity of “One rendering model” to help make your customers more productive and improve your market position.
For import rendering, spin each photo off as a separate thread or process. This is also obvious to your development team, and has been for many years.
Both of these things will be relatively easy to implement I wish, that I could suggest improvements to the Development module pipeline and GPU acceleration, but I don’t know enough about Lightroom internals to do so.
And a strategic development question – how much is Lua limiting you?
Dan
Each image as a thread will kill performance. They need an appropriately sized thread pool. There is nothing obvious about multi threaded code, but yes they should do much better on this front.
“Each image as a thread will kill performance.” We disagree.
Nothing wrong with a thread pool, but it’s irrelevant for this case. The time to spawn a new thread and retire it, is much less than 1/1000th of the time to render the raw image. That’s probably true for spawning and retiring a process as well.
Multi-threading isn’t that hard if you have the right development tools. My card-reader software simultaneously reads from N memory card readers and writes to M output paths, while calculating checksums in the background. I wrote it because I wanted to generate md5 checksums during import, without having to convert to DNGs, and I also wanted my photo names to include the camera model the photo was shot with. The threading was pretty simple: spawn reader and writer threads and connect them with queues. Read from the input queue, process, write to the output queue. The program consists of well under 1K lines of Python code and is I/O bound with fast memory cards.
Having 1000 threads with four cores doesn’t make much sense. If the app is cpu bound, throwing threads at it won’t help. Your app sounds like it was I/O bound.
Who’s we, but the way, do you work on the dev team at Adobe?
Iain,
You’re correct, it is I/O bound using two USB 3 card readers with SanDisk 160MB/sec CF cards and two output paths on my 2.5 GHz i5 Thinkpad laptop. Even more I/O bound, on my desk side tower.
“Who’s we”?
I meant you and I. So instead of writing “We disagree”, I would have been clearer to write “You and I disagree.”
I am not on Adobe’s development team, nor have I ever worked for Adobe. But a fun fact (at least for me) is I shared the stage with John Warnock a few times and in Toronto, he even stole one of my lines. And I think it was in Toronto where, I bummed a ride to the airport with Chuck Geschke. I was working for IBM and joined Adobe’s roadshow to jointly evangelize the web. But don’t misunderstand. I have no influence on Adobe, just fond memories.
Members of my camera club warned that loading Windows 10 would keep us from using our LR5 (disk version). What can be done about that? I know that both Adobe and Windows wants to encourage you to buy and use the latest versions, but for all the money I have invested in three versions of LR and a couple of PS, I am not happy to have to choose a subscription program to make LR work for me. with Windows 10. Is there a work around for this? Perhaps I’ve been misled, but I hate to take the chance until I know more about what is causing the problem.
You have been misled. Windows 10 and Lightroom 5 coexist. I am able to use Lightroom 5.7.1 in the Windows 10 environment with no issue.
– Develop module is S-L-O-W after the most minimal change. Running a gaming rig that exceeds the Lr requirements, and I have followed all optimization instructions including using smart previews, generating all the previews, enabling/disabling/whatever GPU in Lr, etc. My monitor is also only 1990 max resolution, not even 4 or 5k, still very slow.
– Why can we not sync Folders or Smart Collections to Lr-online? Instead, I have to mirror every single folder with an identical collection so that I can post it online. That generates a VERY long sidebar on the left to constantly scroll through. Allow syncing directly of Folders AND Smart Collections.
– Copy/Paste presets. I need to check/uncheck 100 boxes each time I want to copy and paste a specific development setting. Let the pop-up window have a drop-down menu that lets me make presets. “copy all lighting settings” or “gradients” or “spot edits” or “spot edits AND gradients” and whatever else I want. I am tired of clicking all those boxes every single time.
– Online print ordering. I’d like to be able to SYNC all my necessary folders to Lr-Online and set permissions for each one. That way a customer can view only their gallery or galleries using their own unique password. I would also like them to be able to order prints directly from LR-online. I get real tired of exporting (waiting an hour), then uploading at full res to a print site (let’s wait another 1-2 hours) – and oh wait! the upload failed – please upload in parts or try again. My internet is not the problem, 100mbps via Comcast – just those sites time out and cannot resume on their own. Lr-SYNC COULD make sure all photos are uploaded.
–> I guess what I’m looking for is an Adobe version of SmugMug that naturally interfaces with Lr-Online. I tried SmugMug itself and again it was a hassle working between Lr and their site. Still had to export jpg’s instead of how Lr just syncs a smart preview from my raw files directly.
Thank you – I filled out the survey, we’ll see what happens… Is there a timeframe when we can expect to see the first results?
What really needs to be done is a quick bugfix release to fix the issue with the map module. It’s not working properly for weeks now.
I totally agree to You, because the map Module is the mostly used feature for me. I use it to correct the data, that the camera (with built in GPS) has written in the EXIF Part of an image. The not working map module is also some kind of the very bad overall performance…
In general: does anyone need things like editing Images on mobile Devices with poor displays in sunlight, or would many of the people here be much happier without these cloud things, when they get a super performing Desktop app instead? (on a calibrated Monitor!!) Especially photographers in photo studios?! LR is not the Application for Hobby Photographers…
Why is LR5.71 without those cloud things in so many ways better performing than LR6.xx???
Why does LR6 not benefit from these much better performing PS’s nowadays? (with military performing CPU and tons of graphic power?!)
Regards to all the Writers,
Mikel
Back when I had a Canon 40D and 10mp files Lightroom was good IMO… never really had major speed issues with the latest high end PC at the time. Skip to today with Canon 5DIV files at 30mp and lightroom is more cumbersome and slowing me down significantly (mainly culling and waiting for previews in particular 1:1’s in both library and develop modes. My guess is Adobe simply has not moved with the times keeping lightroom code in line with modern PC power and tripple the sized raws vs way back then.
What I find odd though are when you go researching lightroom speed issues / benchmarks etc on today’s latest machines with high end CPU’s and GFX cards I keep reading LR only makes good use of up to 4 cores (and often only 2) etc, etc. I am still using my well served 980X cpu (6 core/ 12 thread) + SSD’s + 12GB ram + GTX 1060 and nearly everything I do in lightroom uses all 6 cores… why are people saying it doesn’t? 1:1 previews uses all 6 cores, develop settings/sliders use all 6 cores, exports use all 6 cores… and ‘mostly’ fairly similar loads on each core.
That said if you overlay CPU + DISK + RAM + GPU live stats LR hardly ever maxes anything out. For example, building 100 1:1 previews on 30mp raws sees all 6 cores used at similar loads but only at about 35% on average over all (goes as low as 10% up to 60% in spikes but more commonly sits around 35%. At the same time 2 x SSD’s (sys + cat/cache) are only ever hitting 1-5% and the 7200 sata disk with original pics hardly hitting 2% in spikes , plenty of ram still available and GPU not doing anything really. The same applies for many different tasks in LR where no hardware is really being pushed or seems like a bottleneck and CPU usage often peaks at 50% or lower. ONLY in develop mode and if I set noise to 100% and then drag say other sliders back and forth can I get CPU to hit 90%-100% usage across 6 cores.
Seems to me lightroom needs a BIG overhaul to make use of both old and new hardware and more common larger MP raws that we work with today. Hardware does not seem like a bottleneck (on most pro or enthusiast machines) by a long shot and CPU is significantly underused along with GPU hardly used at all (low 2-5% and the max I have ever seen is a 20% spike).
Ps… export will also use 6 cores all at 100%. So why, for just one example, in develop mode does it take 5-10 seconds to see a 1:1 preview when hardware is not the bottle neck and CPU is only being pushed between 10%-50%… definitely old and inefficient code IMO.
I can edit 4K60p in realtime on my computer, with effects and layers, but I can’t edit a 24 Mpixels image interactively. Come on.
Look at DaVinci Resolve 14, they rewrote the application from scratch to leverage GPU better and now the thing flies so fast!
LR rewrite should have started years ago.
Today I could have bought a 12-month renew of LR for 20% off (amazon) and I didn’t because I’m frustrated and ready to go elsewhere.
The slowness is the main reason why I’m constantly testing new alternatives to LR as my photo editing takes so long time that it extends several hours my photo editing time. Most of my time goes just for waiting next photo to show up. I recently bought high end laptop in hope of getting it faster but the result is same and it continues costing me time and money. So far capture one looks promising. I usually edit something like 1000 pictures at once and main things I need to do is crop, WB and basic settings.
Having been grandfathered into Lightroom from its predecessor product RawShooter Pro, it wasn’t really a step up back at that time. More features, sure, but hardly ever focused on performance.
At the moment, especially in conjunction wint the Win10 Creators Update, performance is the worst ever; the application frequently makes the entire system hang for short times, and an export job of 90 photos can mean a 5 to 10-minute break during which the machine is otherwise completely unusable.
The only saving grace at the moment is that no other photo workflow appears to come close to LR in terms of library management—which is sad because frankly UX in the library is pretty dire in some parts—, but if any of your competitors *cough*PhaseOne*cough* get smart about that, I’ll be ready to look at alternatives.
I using Lightroom few years,but for the performance it’s big problem. My computer use Two Xeon E5 2683v3, GTX980TI,64Gb RAM,M.2 512Gb SSD. Import canon 5d mark iv Raw, about 1000 photos, build standard preview. It’s very slow for edit photos ,exposure adj, next photos show up times ,etc …..Hopefully it will fix these problems.
My Lightroom struggle the most with “Spot removal” tool. Image becomes unresponsive after adding multiple adjustments of that type.
Recently I wanted to make a surprise for my father. I found his 30-years old slide positives (my father took a lot of photos when he was a student, but for several years these “memories” were closed in a box). I scanned these positives and started cleaning the dust and color dots (chemicals on the film did not survive perfectly for such a long time). I decided to use lightroom, because spot removal is very convenient to use and it has all filters and adjustments I need for that. After cleaning about 100+ dust spots, adding new spot started taking longer and longer…. At some point, adding new spot took more than 1 minute. I had to give up, because fixing another part of the image will take ages… and I still had several other images to develop…
I use high-performing PC with i7-6700k, 16gb of ram, discrete graphics and NVME SSD, running on win10,
I will appreciate if lightroom development team can help with fixing that performance issue.
I’ve done a lot of old film/slide scanning and restoration. I think when you need to apply 10+ spot fixes lightroom should not be the go to program nor do I put much need for adobe to make it so (after all its a non destructive raw editing program and some consideration has to be given to that). Sure 10-20 spot fixes should not be a deal breaker but certainly expectations are unreasonable at 100+. This is the kind of situation where fixing the slides look is done first and then edit in photoshop for dust and spot cleanup.
Thank god. I have the newest Mac mini and if I want to use Lightroom, I’ll start it up, go run some errands and come back. Then I can use it.
Slow, slower, slowest! I shouldn’t have to spend $$$ for a new computer chock full of performance just to run a slow LR program. With higher MP cameras being introduced yearly the computers can keep up with larger file sizes but LR bogs down. Most of us spend an inordinate amount of time post processing and I’m spending 25% longer each session in LR. Come on Adobe its 2017 not 1984!!
A few inputs regarding export;
I’d love to be able to send stuff to an export-queue which I can adjust or edit.
– Either have it paused and start it later (and be able to use different databases)
– edit the queue (move the order and priority of exports to be done before or after each other etc)
– let it work in the background with low cpu-priority so I can continue with other stuff
– or just push maximum play and it uses the computer at max!
Kind of the same way an FTP-program or maybe torrent-program work.
yeah…that would be a dream come true…maybe 10 years from now this will be implemented at the speed things are done now by adobe
Well, the same here. On a MacPro, Quad Core, 64GB RAM (!) with a Raedon HD7970 with 3GB (!), Eizo and second monitor all my CS apps work great. But when opening LR, it all slows down after a short while. Rebooting helps for a while. So looking for Capture One, but due to lack of PS-support stick to LR.
Please Adobe, fix this quick since as a professional photographer this… is undoable.
Frank – Netherlands
Intel Core I7 6820HK 4GHz
GeForce GTX 1080 8Go
32Go ram
Windows 10 and Lightroom latest update
Poor performance, importing, exporting, editing is very slow, sometimes Lightroom freeze before showing changes I made.
Too many useless module for me. I just need Library and development module. All others (cards, books, slideshows, printing and web) are useless.
Exporting is hard, I’m a wedding photographer and when I finish editing a wedding day, I have to export between 500 and 800 photos in different folder. So I sort my photos by categories (town hall, church, party etc etc) with color label (not enough colors by the way) and then I export red label, and then yellow, green, blue… First label export works fine, then when I add an other label to export, LR start to be very very slow. I think you have to “lighten” LR.
I’m pretty sure you gonna make the rights choice to make LR better!
(sorry for bad English, hope it’s readable)
Your English is just fine. And I agree with everything you wrote!
+1
HP Workstation, Dual Xeon, 64Gb Ram, SSHD, NVidia Quadro K22000 4Gb, Windows 10, Lightroom latest update.
Persevered with Lightroom until last month. Writing previews a disaster. Import 2000 frames a day from sports, a nightmare. Import and export speeds a disaster. Gave up writing to DVD as too slow.
Abandoned Lightroom and moved to Photo Mechanic 5 in desperation last month on advice of colleague. No comparison. Uploads, previews and DVD authoring Simultaneous uploads. 10 times faster. Should have moved years ago. Import back to the main catalogue in Lightroom when the real work is done and I have leisure time.
I like to write in my language (its easy to translate with google):
Es wäre schön, wenn Adobe wieder vermehrt an der wichtigsten Lightroomvariante, nämlich der Desktopversion, arbeiten würde. Ich habe den Eindruck, das zuviel Energie in Lightroom mobile gesteckt wurde. Es wird übersehen, das Lightroom seine wahren Stärken aber erst mit einem großen Bildschirm zeigt, mit der klassischen Bedienung mit Maus / Wacom und Tastatur.
Lightroom ist derzeit sehr langsam, insbesondere in den wichtigen Modulen Entwickeln und Katalog (die anderen benutze ich kaum) und die GUI ist leider noch immer sehr schlecht eigenen Bedürfnissen anpassbar – ich hoffe noch immer auf einen systematischen Angleich zu der wesentlich flexibleren Oberfläche von Photoshop.)
Im Moment macht das Arbeiten mit Lightroom leider keinen wirklichen Spaß.
Intel Core I7 6700K 4.8GHz
GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11Gb
32Gb ram
NVMe PCIe C Drive
Photos on NVMe M.2
SSD Scratch cache disk
Every job has its Catalog
Windows 10 and Lightroom latest update
QHD Monitor, I bought a 4k monitor, but LR went from tortoise to snail’s pace.
Every weekend I have 1,500-3,000 new photos to cull and edit. Lightroom performance is driving me mad; I’m upgrading to a CPU with 8/16 or 12/24 core/thread soon, sadly I have read it will not make any difference with LR. Downloading, generating previews, and smart previews can take about 10 hours. Select a large group of photos in library module to do a quick exposure change, and thumbnails will not immediately update unless I visit each thumbnail with the cursor or regenerate previews again and that takes about an hour. Oh, did I not like the WB let me make a change to that and wait another hour to see the effect. Geez, don’t get me started on the export, USE the GPU!!!!! C1 can do it in less than 2-3x faster.
Latest Capture One is having issues and keeps crashing, I would go back to Version 9 but I recently switched to Fuji and older version does not read compressed RAF files.
Adobe needs to make a new program from the ground up that concentrates on professional workflow for people that have or are willing to buy high thread CPUs with powerful GPUs. They can keep trying to improve LR for those that do want all those bells and whistles like Mobile Syncing, Book, Slideshow, Map, Print and Web Modules.
PhaseOne support just figured out what the problem was with Capture One (within 12 hrs, I was the procrastinator thinking I could solve it by searching forums). If Adobe does not fix LR by the time my subscription runs out, I am out.
I have LR CC latest, I run Mac OS 10.12.5
Mac Pro 6.1 12 core dual AMD 700’s 1TB SSD 32 GB Ram 2 x Apple Cinema HD 30’s
Speed is still slow, was not worth buying a 12 Core at £7,500 as my 8 core 3.1 was as fast, all images are render 1.1 previews, still takes time to load sharp image, Caption One Pro runs fast, Regards
Fix the massive slow down in the spot removal tool once you get a few spots on an image. If you shoot portraits this is so bad that it is almost faster to export to Photoshop, edit there and reimport the new file. But then I have a massive TIFF file eating hard drive space .
Develop module is so slow if you zoom in to use a brush or other tool. There’s no effective setting for previews that makes speed feel quick. The number of photos in the catalogue doesn’t have much bearing, due to the slow down just by zooming in.
Please do a better job with Canon 5D4 RAW files. They don’t look clean enough even at ISO 400. It took you about 18 months to get reasonable results with 5DS R raw files, I hope it’s not so long to get good results out of 5D4 files. For critical work I often choose to process my RAW files outside lightroom to get the best from them, then put a 16-bit TIFF back in for cataloguing.
Mac user with i7 quad core 16GB ram SSD intel iris pro graphics. My machine edits video better than stills in Lightroom
Here’s the issues with my (and most people’s) workflow:
Culling – Generally, we quickly cycle through thousands of image in full screen mode. This must be fast, as in about 1 second per image. Do not add the images to a database until culling is finished. Give us the option to use the embedded JPEG. Photomechanic and XNview can both do this.
Import – Most of us use fresh catalogs for each job. This is partly because of organization, but mainly because of performance. Lightroom performs very slowly with large catalogs. Creating a new catalog for every job reduces this risk.
Editing – This is why we use Lightroom. No one comes close to the editing features of Lightroom. However, Lightroom becomes progressively slower the longer you’re editing images. After a while, there can be a delay of 1 – 5 seconds every time we move a slider or change image. This is completely unacceptable and it is the single biggest reason we’re all here complaining to you.
And yes, many of us here complaining have computers that far exceed the processing requirements of Lightroom.
Most people I know use a fresh collection for each job and not a fresh catalogue. If you’re using a fresh catalogue you’re negating the power of Lightroom’s DAM.
Hello i switched to captureone pro, the Performance on Lightroom in the last month it’s very bad…! Lightroom can not manage the new big raws, the Algorithm is to old for the new data files!
The next trouble is the GPU Support… the allegedly Performance improvement, is not available!!!
Sorry, but your best Program runs very bad, repair this Problem and gives all a free update or a new Vision of Lightroom.
I will utility this program.
I have given up on Adobe. The questions about performance are at least 1.5 years late. I can’t believe there is still questions around using GPUs. Where is Lr 2017?
Maybe this is a serious part of why we will continue to see expanding marketshare at Serif (Affinity Photo for desktop and iPad), Macphun, ACDSee, and others.
People, I’m sorry to say this but you are completely misunderstanding the posting made by Adobe.
What it says is: We acknowledge that LATELY there has been a performance issue, and one that CPU scheduling problem or memory leak or whatever is causing it has been found, we are again happy with the product and collecting your money. There is absolutely nothing to indicate they would embark on a “full rewrite for performance” endaevour. It just doesn’t pay of 🙂
@Keyser
Tom’s post
“On Lightroom Performance
I would like to address concerns recently voiced by our community of customers around Lightroom
performance, as improving performance is our current top priority. We have a history, starting with our first public beta, of working with our customers to address workflow and feature needs, and we’d like to take that same approach regarding your performance concerns. We already understand many of the current pain points around GPU, import performance, certain editing tasks and review workflows and are investing heavily in improving those areas. Over the past year we’ve added numerous enhancements to address your performance concerns but we understand we will have a lot of work to do to meet your expectations. ”
—————————-
It does NOT say – We acknowledge that LATELY there has been a performance issue, and one that CPU scheduling problem or memory leak or whatever is causing it has been found, we are again happy with the product and collecting your money.
Your cynicism is exactly as I feel, but its not what Tom’s post says.
So did you guys just give up on Lightroom to focus on Nimbus, a cloud based service that most of us won’t want to use due to bandwidth restrictions and download times?
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/02/adobe-previews-its-next-gen-photo-editor/
My new PC is i7-6700-K with z-170K motherboard, 36GB RAM, 1TB M.2 960 SSD, 1TB 850 EVO SSD and 1050 GPU.
After about 20 minutes of using LR it becomes practically unusable. Each time I move between level of edits it takes 4-45 seconds to render the image. Impossible.
It is frustrating.
I’ve used Lightroom since it was RAWConverter – that amazing little app that was borg’ed into Lightroom. It was fast lean and efficient – everything that Lightroom is still not.
LR bottle necks somewhere, and the result is slow, sluggish and exceptionally frustrating.
I’d hate to move from LR, like a divorce, its not the end of the world, its a new beginning with something younger, faster and with more interest in you.
As professional photographers, we really want one thing from Adobe: Earn our business. You switched to the subscription model, fine. But you did it with the promise of continual updates. While we got minor updates, you stopped competing and your product got lethargic. At this point, I honestly believe that you have come to the conclusion that your consumers are so entangled in your software ecosystem and have put so much time to becoming proficient in how to use them that they will never leave, no matter how little attention you give to your product. Let’s rectify that: WE WILL LEAVE. With other software programs (like Capture One) doing a better job, we have other options. I truely believe this is your last chance. If Adobe doesn’t come out with a version of Lightroom that is innovative, impressive, and responds to the basic request of all it’s users: speed, we will leave you. We’ve been sticking around, hoping you fix the issues. Now that we know you’re listening and that you’re trying to fix the problems, if you don’t come through, it will be the end. I appreciate you for asking for our opinions, I hope you hear us.
To summarize: Don’t take us for granted. Innovate. Be the best. Earn our business.
+1 Cash flow is good… Minor feature updates are meh… major updates are simply new camera support and lens profiles… No pressure to improve as we take your money regardless now and do not need make a new standalone version standout over the previous version… Hopefully its not too little too late sooner rather than later.
It’s funny because those of us who saw this coming and stuck with our old standalone versions were shouted down by OTHER PHOTOGRAPHERS saying “It’s only $10 a month bro!” . If there was a more united front against being forced to CC, maybe Adobe would care more but they don’t. They’re like the owner of a mediocre football team in a big market that sells out the stadium whether they win 2 games or 7 games a year (see Houston Texans). They won’t ever change and neither will Adobe.
+1
I thought Lightroom was acting slow due to myself having an iMac from 2011. Went out 3 months ago and bought the latest 27″ iMac, 5K screen, 2TB with fusion drive, as Lightroom is my my main tool for my photography.
Sadly for myself and my wallet, the new iMac hasn’t made much difference in performance when using Lightroom.
It is slow when in develop mode, clicking on a photo, it takes 6-8 seconds for the detail in the image to appear, I get slow down when I am entering my keyboarding, etc, etc.
The funny thing is, when I purchased the iMac and was having problems with Lightroom, I contacted one of the Adobe tech guys (online chat), he then connected up with my Mac, had a look round, switched the graphics card on and then off. He then claimed it was Apples fault. My reply was ‘so Apple need to build a computer around your software?’ There wasn’t much of an answer to that, but I was told that Adobe would be releasing an update to Lightroom next month which would address any problems of slow down (that was 3 months ago)
I am just glad I bought Lightroom as one off and I am not paying for CC.
keywording, not keyboarding.
Happily for my wallet I am on a 7 year old PC albeit a still decent one with mod cons and it runs the same as your new and many others latest greatest hardware. Its a bit sad… such failure… the rental model is good for only one party to the equation and has resulted in less innovation.
@Nick Dantonio – FULLY AGREE – it’s a shame Adobe why you don’t update your software. I have a MacBook Pro 2016. When I import or edit pictures, it kills my CPU and fan. Please fix this problem, otherwise same thoughts like other, leave Adobe!
I’ll just echo a lot of what has been said. Lightroom is very slow given what it’s doing. Yes this comparison isn’t perfect but I also work as a professional video editor, and your other software Premiere is able to play back 4k footage color corrected with lumetri with clip file sizes in the GBs. It should be instantaneous to browse through jpg previews of files around 30mb like they are from my stills camera. Especially when I’ve already rendered smart previews. No excuse!
Happy to see a priority on Lr desktop after a while.
Performance is very important to speed up the workflow.
Just to mention not to postpone quality, for example Lr is still lacking the 30 bit color display capability PS has.
Q: What should I get to run lightroom?
A: Patience. 64 GB of Patience.
Q: How about an SDD or those fast new m.2’s?
A: No… sata 5400 will be fine! It makes very little difference.
Q: Oh, how about a fast GFX card then?
A: No… it will work better with that turned off actually!
Q: Ok so really I should just keep my old machine for lightroom?
A: Yes!
+1 unfortunatly that is the truth.
exept that if the catalog is on a ssd and the cache is on ssd it will be faster, but exept for ssd a 2011-2012 pc and 2017 will have almost the same performance in lr
Wait I have more questions…
Q: Sounds like it run on good on my old windows 95 machine then?
A: No
Q: I have LR6 on a dusty old windows box so can I just use that with my 5DIV files?
A: No, the machine sounds perfect but unfortunately for you No, you need CC versions.
Q: Oh ok… so am I right in thinking you require me to be modern and up to date, including my rental subscription in order to use lightroom with the latest greatest camera tech but the prgoram itself will run just as good on an old dusty box of yester-year?
A: Yes… its good for our cash flow!
I think it’s funny that the recommendation to fix performance problems is usually “disable stuff”. I purchas…rented…my software so that I *can* take advantage of my GPU, awesome hardware, as well as other potential amazing capabilities of Lightroom. Asking to start turning off all kinds of parameters is like saying “unplug from the internet if you don’t want viruses”. Or disable Bluetooth on your iPhone. Wait…I need Bluetooth to connect to my wireless headphones since I don’t have a 3.5mm audio jack and cannot charge my phone and listen to audio at the same time. But I digress.
Clearly there is a fundamental performance problem with LR. Has been for a few years now. Performance for me has degraded over time (not that it was stellar to begin with).
I agree that we should vote with our wallets.
But how many people are *really* going to do that rather than still stick around waiting for Adobe to fix LR problems? Unfortunately, despite all the customer threatening and talk, I’ll bet Adobe hasn’t seen any statistically significant drop in revenue due to LR dissatisfaction and people switching over to Capture One or whatever.
How do we change this??
You are right that many invested people do not change quickly and put up with major problems for a long time, often far too long. But it does happen and usually when it does it happens in a big way not in dribs and drabs. Look at GoPro’s fall and scramble… once the top of the food chain and in a very short time got hit hard due to complacency. There is a fine line for many companies as to how far they push or ignore their customers or competition. Adobe still has some great products (Photoshop)… Lightroom and for that matter Premiere will end up not the favourite soon if they continue down this road.
I am as lazy and set in my ways as it gets but even I am willing to give Capture One Pro a chance even if it means in the short term I will lose money due to not being able to get upgrade pricing. I paid full price for LR the first time and upgrades after that so if Lightroom drives me away, it will take years for me to trust them again.
You have to vote with your wallet. These software devs don’t understand anything other than money and seeing their colleagues get fired. You think these guys living it up on their 6 figure salaries in San Jose give a rat’s behind for the average photographer or small business owner who needs their software? They’re thinking about their next bonus and what the next recruiter from Google is going to offer them to move to Mountainview.
Right concept wrong level. Most coders take great pride in their work. It upper management that favours profit over quality and does not put enough resources or investment back into the dev team.
Adobe Systems Incorporated
NASDAQ: ADBE – 14 Jul., 6:54 pm GMT-4
146.16USD
Stock price is at all time high… so the model of rental software without reinvestment in the product (just appear to be doing stuff on a minimal level) works for the company and investors… until people reach that point of being over it. Adobe have very much become the company that reacts to the stock graph not it customers concerns or productivity.
Soon we will know if Adobe’s rulers get too greedy for there own good with multiple new raw software apps coming out along with existing more efficient ones… or if they will just scrape in with a goal saver before the final buzzer.
“But how many people are *really* going to do that rather than still stick around waiting for Adobe to fix LR problems? ”
Me for one: after suffering the utter betrayal of Apple in abandoning Aperture (which was, a pretty much still is, a much better app than Lightroom), I made some very conscious decisions when moving to Lightroom – for example ensuring that all my metadata is written into the files/xmp, including Lr specific things – e.g. I tag collection names into the IPTC Job Identifier field as well on the image. I’m doing my level best to make any future move easier.
And I’m beginning to sense the competition really sniffing around Adobe now: Capture One is very close to effectively doing a rewrite of Aperture, but much better. Affinity are working on a DAM partner for Affinity Photo. C1 claim that Lr catalog import even preserves some of the adjustments (no idea if this is true). That’s without talking about some of the other contenders out there like PhotoSupreme or DigiKam. I think that there are a lot of pissed off Adobe users, and some competitors who are sniffing the opportunity to grab some serious market share.
The most interesting people are the RAW/Photo editing people adding DAM capaibility. They’ve done the hard work on developing photo editing software. DAM capability is, in all honesty, some much more basic database architecture (which, mystifyingly, Adobe can’t nail – I could get better dB performance on queries out of MS Access than Lr, by a factor of 10…)
Adobe needs to turn up the heat in the kitchen severely in my view. And if they do: great. I have no desire to spend another month on migration. Lr *could* be a great piece of software, a killer app. I have 17,000 images going back 20 years in my workflow right now: I’d rather get on with them.
Before I chime in let me just say that despite poor performance I still love Lightroom, but it easily steals away hours each week waiting for things that should be instantaneous.
While I love lightroom for editing, I believe it’s one of the worst cataloging app ever. Why? It’s paintfully slow to scroll through thousands of images. Google used to have a free app called Picasa. This was 4 years ago. It was so fast I would use it to find photos. As I typed in a keyword matching photos would show up. It was near instantaneous. It just didn’t have a good editor.
Lightroom, with the power of ADOBE behind it, should run circles around every other photo management software on the planet, yet it seems to be one of the worst on this task.
I mean it is good if they started trying. I think the performance can dramatically be improved by getting a proper gpu boost and multi core support. Hope you guys can roll out the update soon.
I think what I have the hardest time understanding is how with each version it gets slower? I think I started on LR2 or 3 and it was great. Never an issue. But every upgrade it seemingly got slower and slower?
The worst part is I am spending more $ to make my machine even faster JUST for LR and yet it somehow slows down more?! And when I am sitting and waiting for pictures to come into focus or even just appear while culling, I am just wasting so much time. And time = $ and time away from my family and looking at a fuzzy screen longer than I need too!
I no longer suffer with anything Adobe related. I now use Capture One Pro and Affinity Photo. Best thing I’ve done for my photo work, ever.
I’m using Lightroom daily for my photo editing job on a brand new iMac 5K with a 4GB AMD Radeon R9 M395X.
I’m creating new libraries for each job, averaging 1000 to 3000 photos per job. I’m generating standard previews with either .CR2 or .DNG raw files from a Canon 5D Mark IV. I’m also using full resolution jpg’s at times.
As other users mentioned, I’m seeing the loading bar and wasting a LOT of time waiting for images to load even though previews have been generated. I’ve tried using Lightroom with and without the OpenGL option on mac, I don’t see much of a difference in performance.
Lightroom cannot operate during its preview generation process, it locks up and is very slow if attempting to edit a photo before it has finished generating previews. I have to step away and wait for all previews to generate (which is also a very slow process).
In some instances, I’ll import 1080p videos recorded on the 5D Mark IV (at 23.98 / IPB compressed) as I’m storing names of subjects in photos that way (I know the 1DX can do this much more easily), Lightroom struggles to switch from viewing a video to a regular still. The whole application locks up for several seconds before coming back to normal operation. While even allow the import of videos if it can’t handle 1080p videos in 2017?
Lightroom CC 2015.10.1 release – camera raw 9.10.1 / iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) – 3.3 GHz Intel Core i5, 16 GB 1867 MHz DDR3, AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB / 500GB internal Flash storage
Just to put things in prospective.
I ran a bit of a test on creating Smart Previews.
My average for one (1) hour of mostly .dng files with a few .jpg file was about 6000 images. To me, that’s not real fast.
LR and files on 850 Evo Pro
GTC 760 w/4M
16GB RAM
AMD Athlon II X4 640 running a 3.0GHz
GTX 760
lets put it in perspective….too late Adobe. Countless interactions with you to be repeatedly and often rudely told it was a user fault, not the software. Why has it taken so damn long for you to listen to the people who use it everyday? good luck with it, but I – like so many others – have given up and moved on. The best thing for me and our business was dropping as many adobe products as possible.
Just to put my five-pennyworth in. I’m a ‘hobbist’ photographer using LR 6, and have about 10000-images on disk, the largest folder holds about 2000-images, a mix of RAW and JPG. I run what is probably the minimal hardware configuration that LR will run on. HP Compaq 3GHz Win 7 with 4Gb RAM and built-in ATI Radeon 3000 graphics. However I’ve never experienced any performance issues with LR, managing to load 1000 images in grid view in a few seconds, and maybe 4-5-seconds to load an image into edit mode, and the same to export when edited. Or is that too slow for you? Can I suggest that anyone with LR performance issues takes a look at what else is going on in the background? Or maybe your computer is configured badly.
You should probably take the time to read through the comments. This is having a larger effect on modern processors and not older ones. Most of us have been through the re-configuring of LR, shutting down external processes, etc cetera.
4-5 seconds per photo may not seem so unreasonable if editing 20-200 every once in a while. However, some of us have to edit over 3,000 every week. I estimate that I lose easily 8-10 hours every week waiting on LR to run previews/smart previews/exporting/rendering if not more. I don’t particularly like wasting my time when I could be doing something more productive.
Adobe is the industry leader and has the most plugins and presets by 3rd party. All other alternatives maybe faster but one has to give up a lot to switch. It is ridiculous that I was forced to upgrade from Lightroom 3.4 to 4.0 because I bought a newer camera. The MP was the same but performance was much worse and it been downhill ever since.
At over 70-years old I’m probably what you would call an ‘old school’ photographer, brought up on wet-process developing and printing. If you’ve never done it just imagine an hour or two, in total darkness or under safe-light, to get negs and prints done to find they are ‘not quite right’ and you start all over again. I do realise that for you, and many others, there are commercial considerations that drive the process. But has it become a case of the tail wagging the cat? You have my sympathy!
https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2017/20170716_0825-AdobeLightroom-performance.html
Time for me to chime in. Semi-serious hobbyist here, was a perpetual licence holder for PS and LR, now on CC. Adobe, you are losing more and more trust from me on a daily basis. I know and appreciate your workflow and interface, but performance is poor on the big recent RAW files. GPU support is frequently buggy or discontinued in favour of newer systems, and new features have been slow coming. I’ve gone along with your subscription model despite my misgivings, and watched your stock rise while user requests and product improvements have been slow coming. This is the total opposite of the deal you promised CC customers.
Your support staff and forum moderators too often reach for ‘disable GPU’, ‘trash preferences’, or ‘it must be your system’. Remember the LR Mac ‘black panels’ issue? When you finally gonfirmed the issue, you repeatedly refused to provide a timeline for a fix and repeatedly had ‘product champions’ sugges users rollback to earlier versions on forums. Where is the dialogue in that?
With Google Nik collection support slowly waning with time, I’ve been testing out the competition to try to get the features and performance that I want in the future. I’ve been pleasantly surprised in some ways. Why don’t we have individual structure/detail/contrast adjustments on shadows, midtones, and highlights in LR, like I find with the competition? Why don’t we have faster generation of preview and sorting through images? Why don’t we always get user feedback when previews are being generated? Did you see how easy Macphun make it to generate a luminosity mask in Luminar? I am not interested in new performance sapping cruft like facial recognition, google GPS lookup, etc etc.
In short, where is Lightroom 2017?
Tom,
First off, I’m very happy to see you guys asking these questions. The rest of this is going to seem harsh, but I have a lot of pent up aggravation with LR performance. I just took the survey, this is my opportunity to add detail. BTW, the survey only has 6.x as versions. My About LR box says 2015.10.1.
MY wife and I are serious non-professional nature photographers. We do a mix of landscape and wildlife, including a lot of birds. We shoot raw only using 5D IV for wildlife and that or E-M5 II for landscape. I capture thousands of frames a year, my wife tens of thousands.
Several years ago I switched to PhotoMechanic for all of my review and selections. I now only import a few hundred images per year into LR. I only recently convinced my wife to use PhotoMechanic, after she killed her third MacBook Pro. She used to spend many hours a week with the fans screaming full speed generating standard and 1-1 previews. She does most of her reviewing in the loupe view for each image, often going to 100%.
The most important thing you can do with LR, BY FAR, is to relax the insistence on absolute perfect fidelity in every image display. Give me the choice to do review and selection from just the embedded JPEG. Do not render the raw unless I have done manual edits in the Develop module. Either ignore import adjustments in the Library module views, or do them to the JPEG – but only if that can be done with absolutely minimal CPU/GPU cycles. It is not acceptable to me to have audible fans when in the library module.
Also, stop putting the rating/flag setting alerts on top of images! That is not a machine performance issue but a huge human performance issue. If I were using LR for review, I would spend a lot of time in the grid view with 3 wide rows. Suppose I’m looking at the left bottom image. I press 2 and LR puts up the firgging “Set Rating to 2” alert right on top of the next image – the one I’m already looking at. Every time that happens I want to punch the monitor.
thanks for listening,
Alan
I don’t have so many issues like some of you, but Lightroom is definitely taking a lot of resources. I have a completely new iMac which I use primarily for video editing. Nevertheless when I import a lot of pictures and start scrolling I immediately hear the fan inside the iMac starting to cool. I have to open a lot of plugins while video editing to get to that point. BUT – Lightroom still runs smoothly. Loud but smoothly 😉
Please focus on performance, particularly with common tasks like scrolling in the gallery, switching between the develop and gallery modules, entering the develop module, even opening the app–Lightroom feels slow and lethargic. Sometimes I accidentally click on the app in my dock and think, “shit! there goes my computer for 20 seconds.” Using Apple’s Photo.app feels 5x faster: I know the hardware can do it. I’ve tried everything from a fully maxed out iMac 5k to a dual 22-core (44-core total) PC w/ Quadro video cards — makes no difference: software doesn’t appropriately use available hardware. Please please please make Lightroom great again.
Lightroom’s workflow and design is fantastic (mostly), however the performance is grossly unacceptable, and has been for a very long time. The program is unenjoyable to use because of the numerous and considerate performance issues.
Other companies can produce programs that render, photos or even 4K video much better than Lightroom. Adobe simply needs to make it a priority, they should have done so years ago.
Cut the fat. Make the code blazingly efficient. Make the program fast. Never ad anything to it that would slow it down again.
I’m not software engineer but I would guess that the LR probably needs an entire engine rewrite.
Perhaps with extendable Modules that can be installed based on user preference (Printing, Plugin suites, or advanced camera controls/tether options etc.) so the program doesn’t become bloated with Junk a user doesn’t need (for instance, most users would never use the Print module, so we do we all have to have it installed?)
Normally I’d complain most about lacking pro level features, such as a multi output queue for processing, or fully customizable dim levels for the “Lights Out” feature, and of course, all the tethering control Phase offers, but what I want more than anything else is for Lightroom to simply work in a realtime and responsive manner.
Tom,
What a good news. But…are you blind or no ears? The message for slow Lightroom (quotes everywhere) is abundant for many years. You missed that?
So, I wont fill in the form because I believe you will only listen to it after at least five years.
Sorry to be so blunt, but I cant see it differently at the moment.
The most galling aspect of this is the notion that the problem is only recent. Photographers have been complaining about this for at least 2 years and Adobe has only just found out? I don’t think so! is this a publicity stunt to preempt an announcement?
As a long time user of LR I have noted that importing images does seem to take a very long time to load and get previews. I have adjusted the behind the scene settings as recommended by Adobe and still find process is slow. Now I love LR it’s my goto app but when it comes to culling photos, well sorry guys I’m now having to use ON1 RAW from loading SD card to viewing almost instant and can do the usual star/color rating as you would do in LR. I have noted that almost everyone has stated that LR is resource heavy even with 32GB of ram my system can still lag. But still I won’t give up on LR as they are getting better but would like to see how they can match ON1 RAW for import/viewing speed.
I took the survey and my main complaint was about the rendering of Fuji’s X-trans RAF-files. I’m currently using Iridient X-transformer to convert my RAF-files to DNG’s and the importing them to LR, because it does a better job at rendering them than LR does.
LR sadly still suffers from the infamous “watercolor”/”painter” effect when it comes to rendering foliage or other more complex textures, making things look mushy or smeared. LR could also be a bit better when it comes to sharpness and details in RAF-files.
I really hope this will be improved/fixed in LR in the future so I won’t have to use X-transformer.
I also use FUJI and have the same problems as you…
But the survey was about “performance” issues… not features…
Although I applaud your effort, I think this was not the right place to place that problem.
I’ve just about had enough. I can fold clothes or do the dishes or wash the car waiting for images to load in this bloated program. Its beyond frustrating. I have a new imac and yet sit around waiting for anything to happen. I use a program like Fast Raw Viewer which just speeds though everything, how can LR be this ridiculously slow? I hate it more every day.
Let’s face it, working on 50-100megapixel images on a 5K display feels like like the same, frustrating struggle as we had in 1993 working on 300mb file in Photoshop 2.5. Go ahead and increase the RAM footprint all you want but we’ve got to have better performance. Nothing shows this more than doing lots of adjustment brush edits on a 50+ megapixel file while using 5K display. Even on the fastest, newest, loaded Macs and PCs this leads to 10+ seconds of inactivity waiting for the machine to catch up as you retouch which kills the creative flow of the process.
I totally agree with your view. All the waiting times – all the the interruptions of the creative process are the most important factor. Thank you very much!
I am using Lightroom CC on I7,32GB, SSD, Windows10 Pro. Performance over all ois (very) ok, but when I want to load Pictures form the Smartphone it takes a long time, because LR has to read all the previews of all CD an other Media. It would be fine, if I could choose a dirctory and/or date to improve the performnce at import.
Thank You
Jelto Buurman
I have not suffered a bunch of performance issues like described above, but have noticed over the past 2 years as my photo count has dramatically increased with resulting larger catalog file, performance on all facets of the operation slowly slowing down.
My main input to Adobe is Lightroom desktop needs a huge upgrade for the clone/healing tool. It needs the same thing as Content Aware in Photoshop and other raw editor programs like ON1 RAW 2017 and Macphun. Not a monthly cloud subscriber so no access to Photoshop. Also need some layering ability to replace the sky with a sky library like in ON1RAW. Giving both these programs a serious look because my desktop Lightroom can not do either of these features, which a modern raw editor should do.
Dear Adobe,
do you remember QuarkXpress? They had the DTP market sown up in the late 90s until hubris got the better of them. You should remember because it was your own InDesign that stole all their customers when they got so pissed off at Quark that they started looking around for an alternative.
This feels like your QuarkExpress moment…
For pity’s sake get the basics right! Speed on the desktop is the number one priority for most of your customers, yet instead of solving that problem, which has been arouond for years, you waste resources developing mobile sharing and stock photo selling stuff. Really? If you can’t see this then you will become the next Quark…
Adobe please run these 2 tests to see how off the pace LR is for professional photographers.
1) Import & Select from 5000 pics (a typical wedding/event # & a typical 1st step in a workflow)
A) Use LR
B) Then use PhotoMecanic
The difference is unbelievable!
2) Shoot tethered using high frame rate shooting (say 2 shots/second)
A) Use LR in either AutoImport mode or Tether mode
B) Use CaptureOne
These tests will exemplify how far off the track LR is for typical use cases for many pro photographers & why most pro photographers I know use PhotoMecanic & Capture for these steps.
Everyone I kmow who uses LR talks about how unusable it has become. Also let us hide tabs we never use. Most of us live in Library & Develop so we don’t want to see the others. Its a reminder of the time being expended on non-core development by Adobe.
While I agree on your scenarios, you should -just for fun- try to right-click on the tabs…
I am not sure if any other major software company would have done differently than Adobe did. Adobe is clearly a company driven by management input only. I am sure almost none of the management team is using Lightroom at all. So they probably do not know about the product much except the info given by the engineering team. However what they know about is numbers, and they are pretty good at that. Just look at the stock prices of Adobe in the last three years. I am sure anyone of use would think that they are doing an amazing job if their salary would also rise at the same rate.
Does Adobe know at what level every product is contributing to the steady rise in profit? We do not know. I have been an CC user for years both professionally and private (photography plan only for the private part) and never did I come across a survey asking the importance of every product they are offering. I would assume Adobe would log how often I use their products and the length of every session to give them an idea how every product is responsible for the rise in profit. And judging fom their actions lightroom is ranking pretty high. So why change a product which is been used so much and helps with the profit? How would any company driven by numbers act otherwise?
This brings us to the customer. Clearly the product is doing a great job for the customer as well, otherwise why would anyone use it. This makes me wonder about the previous comments. Yes Lightroom needs a lot to improve but doesn’t it mean that lightroom is still the best option for me if I am using it? Otherwise I would have jumped to another product (I am in a state of considering my options and Capture One looks promising but until I make the jump Lightroom is the best option for me). I, the consumer, am stating that Adobe is doing a better job than the compatition by choosing their products. So I think every user complaining should still keep in mind that they have chosen the product instead of any other option.
Finally about the engineering team. I don’t think this whole issue has anything to do with the engineering team and is a result by bad management decisions. Bad at least for the customers, as stated above the company is doing fine by the decisions made. A company driven only by numbers will not act otherwise if the numbers are good. This is a common issue in every big company. Just look what has happened to Apple.
I’ve been with LR since Version 1 Beta. The big draw was it was “For Photographers designed BY Photographers”.
Now it appears it’s “For Adobe’s Stockholders BY Adobe’s clueless, uncaring, Management”. It’s quite obvious they’re happy to take our money and promise to fix things without ever really DOING anything.
Case in point: Releasing DeHaze right AFTER they released LR6 with no update for purchasers, you had to join their CC money stealing service. I was toying with doing so, but when they did THAT I said scr*w them. That was SO wrong.
LR6 is so slow I groan when I have to use it.
I’m running a system with 1TB SSD, i7 6700K unlocked, overclocked to 4.1GHz, AMD R9 Fury, and a Gaming Gigabyte Motherboard. Can’t use GPU (WHAT??!?!) and runs the same as my 6 year old system I upgraded from. Absurd. I can edit 4K video at speed, but I can’t spot remove in LR unless I take a Valium…
OH, we’ve noticed LATELY there are some performance problems … right. And I noticed lately the earth turns.
LLPOF.
What exactly are you DOING with that fortune you receive from the MILLIONS of people who had no choice but to pay you $120/year? Certainly not hiring Managers that give a cr*p about the customer.
Corporations exist for TWO things – make money for the stockholders, and make money for the Officers of the company, and not in that order. Any resemblance to customer service is strictly to meet THOSE goals, and if you think otherwise you’re deluded. Most great products start out as a dream of an inventor or programmer, who then has to get others to market it, and so the road to hell begins. It’s Adobe MANAGEMENT, not the programmers to blame here.
Now they’re working Project Nimbus, a CLOUD based system to let you move between Desktop and Mobile.
Wait. We don’t we HAVE that?!?
Hmmm sounds like a way to announce the NEW and IMPROVED LR, no longer called “Lightroom”, so we don’t have to keep our promise that stand alone versions will continue to be available. Can anyone say LR7? No? Well get ready, it ain’t happening, people.
Oh, and “We’ll give you $20 OFF Nimbus RIGHT NOW since you’re a loyal LR customer!” **
Wow. A WHOLE $20. After you sign up FOR THE SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE!!! You watch, it will happen.
(** Signup includes a whole 5GB of Nimbus Space for all your precious photographs. Addition space available for a small monthly fee. Storage fees NOT included in the monthly Nimbus subscription.)
Lightroom is DEAD. Long Live NIMBUS! Just put all your pictures right here on our nice, save, secure server.
Think it’s finally time to bite the bullet on Capture One. {Sigh} And I SO love LR. I “sold” at least a dozen people on it. All things come to an end, I think LR’s end is near.
PuterPro
I believe Lightroom is dead as well. It’s sad because I really like and use it a lot (5.7). It’s my belief that it’s all about the money. Adobe cannot convince enough photographers to switch to the rental program. This forces them to produce a product worth buying again and again. They have not done that with Lightroom. I upgrade every other version. Fist 1, then 3, now 5. Ver. 7 will likely never show up. Sadly and reluctantly, I think it’s time to start looking for something else. It was nice while it lasted. Adobe will likely shrink and die out with all the other data grabbing, rental companies.
A late feedback from my side:
The Performance of all Adobe applications is embarrassing, especially Acrobat and Lightroom.
Out of my perspective it is not clear for me why Lightroom doesn’t use the available CPU power. E.g. my system provides 32 cores and 64 GB RAM (3 TB SSDs) and Lightroom uses in best case 2-6 cores, in most situation only 1 core. More than 7-8 GB RAM is not used from Lightroom. So the system runs nearly in idle status. (Win10 64bit)
The trend to a multi-core environment is clear since years on the market. But important software packages like Lightroom, Acrobat, Photoshop don’t catch up this possible power.
WHY?
As a CC customer I can’t understand this.
My catalog file has over 100,000 pictures. Also, I frequently perform mask processing in RAW development, then the operation of LR becomes unstable and it forcibly terminates. Furthermore, I restart LR and develop, but LR shut down.
I am angry enough to go crazy!
MacBook Pro 15″ 2015 – OS X El Capitan
(Core i7 2.8 GHz, 16GB, SSD 1TB)
Lightroom CC 2015.12
Strangely, LR works great for me. I run a second hand old Dell i7, albeit with 32gb ram.
I process weddings and edit 2 a week. If it was painful, I’d jump ship!
http://Www.facebook.com/EyecandyPhotoUK
Yes, I made a similar comment earlier, and it seems that newer, ‘better’ specified computers are having more problems than older ones with apparently less memory and graphics capabilities.
Modern was the term used, not better. But keep confusing the dialog to fit whatever your end goal is. Hey if it works for you, must be good enough, eh?
your software is pathetic and everyone knows it. unless rendering on a 1920×1080 screen forget having good performance. Invest heavily in how it renders on 5k screens and your performance issues are over.
I’m also concerned that the long term plan for Adobe is to migrate away from Lightroom. Like a lot of tech firms they think everyone is working in tech valley and has fast wifi everywhere they go. Well… no thanks.
Come on competitors, it’s time to step up. There’s a few good contenders around – and some are very close to snatching LR’s crown and making a play for the PS market.
Does anyone know if Adobe is even reading these comments? Thousands of dollars worth of customers views and not a word (that I can see).
John
I have read every post on this thread and am seriously depressed regarding the state of Lr.
I sincerely hope that you make a real world difference to the Lr performance issues.
If you do release a replacement product for Lr (such as Nimbus) then you need to make sure that it is working perfectly out of the gate. I am not interested in waiting another 10 years to get a product to 80% complete status.
My fear for the future is having to edit 100mb raw files and 1000mb psd files. I do not want to be doing that in the cloud and I want to have control over the hardware which will do the processing. If Lr or Nimbus force me down that road then I will be saying goodbye to Adobe.
I already own a Capture One licence and plan to upgrade my camera gear in the Autumn. The only decision remaining is if I will continue to pay Adobe for a crippled product and service. The ball is in your court and fast approaching the last chance saloon.
So many posts with questions and reamarks. It is really amazing and shocking that no real comment from Adobe is seen here (as far as I noticed). It concerns me and hope Adobe is now preparing real answers. But I fear the worst.
I just added a Geforce GTX 1080 Ti card with 11 GB of Vram to my rig and noticed… absolutely no improvement.
I verified this by noticing that GPU usage was 0% while Lr generates 1:1 previews.
I understand this is by design — but is it bad design? I’m no chip expert but shouldn’t Lr be using the GPU for whatever it can?
Furthermore, I know Lr doesn’t use the GPU for the 2nd monitor, only the primary. Why not? Going through photos on library or develop mode still has a ~1s lag (these are 80 mb RAW files at 42 mp) – given the huge amount of RAM and VRAM in my machine (32 gb ram and 11 gb vram as noted above) shouldn’t Lr speed this up?
Why isn’t Lr built more efficiently and why doesn’t it take full advantage of the available hardware?
I’ve been using Lightroom since v1.
I noticed the fallback on performance since v4.
Since LR6 its really abysmal. The only workaround is to frequently restart the application and you will see some improvement. If anyone has a decent alternative for Lightroom please let me know.
We have always been using powerfull cpu’s and gpu’s with ram to spare :).
For whatever reason, with my six year old PC running Windows 10 Home, I am not having any performance issues with LR CC (latest update). The only slight slowdown I notice is that if I open LR and it returns to the Library (because that’s where it was when I closed LR), and I go to Develop for the first time, it takes 3-4 seconds for the image to be displayed in Develop. After that, I can switch back and forth with no delay. I build 1:1 previews when importing Nikon, Canon and Sony RAW files.
The computer:
ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe/GEN3
i7-2600K
16GB RAM
2 SSD drives — C: and second for LR library
2 WD HD
ATI Radeon HD 3850 and 4300 series video cards
2 monitors — 27″ and 20″
Acceleration off in LR.
LR catalog: ~30,000 images
John
In 2008 Adobe laid-off 600 employees. In 2009 Adobe cut the workforce by another 9%. In 2011 Adobe laid-off 750 employees. My guess is that in all those employees there were a few that really knew how to code the software. So what we have is software stuck in the early 2000’s or thereabouts, that runs fine on 10-year old computer technology, but hasn’t caught-up with current hardware. Just a thought.
Lightroom CC (2015.10.1), iMac 5k, 32 GB of RAM, 10GB Camera Raw Cache, 85k photos in catalog, previews pre-rendered at appropriate size.
I use LR daily, it tends to run slow as molasses at times and it’s driving me up the walls. Browsing, editing, preview rendering.. all unnervingly sluggish. The powerful iMac’s fans reliably spin up when rendering previews.
At this point, either Adobe get their act together regarding LR performance or Serif will quickly take over once they release their Affinity DAM.
adobe can not do it …adobe isn’t APPLE …adobe is can not do it even simple import and export …I have lot of software used in different catogerys in windows and by apple
you adobe guys dumb! you guys suck!
i want my money back !
I would like to ask You – Adobe – to think about users that have to use 2 computers (or more) in work.
1. Workstation in studio or home.
2.Laptop on locations, travels.
There is no simple way to work and fast copy files between two computers (exporting catalogs is just silly).
I love how it is done in C1 with sessions (just one job in a session folder that can be moved around).
pleaseee this is a really big pain for us Professionals.
To read the comments despairing over LR’s very poor performance from both Mac users and Windows users is for me very disappointing. I have been hoping that ‘experts’ would have system settings recommendations that I might apply to deliver significant performance improvements but this now looks to be a forlorn hope. One year ago I bought a Microsoft Surface Book that I was assured would run LR very well. In a photography group that I participated in where every other member had some type of Mac, my new high spec Surface Book was easily the worst performer. So, recently I bought a MacBook Pro that I expected would run LR so much better than the Surface but so far I have not seen the performance gain that I’d expected. I now need to try to sell one of these laptop computers; either the Surface Book or the iMac Pro but I am hesitating as I’m not really sure of which would be the better one if both were set up optimally.
Well, for me is not even able to open a catalog.
I note it fails when I scroll to “Publish Services”, takes along time to return control to me.
Without speed, there is no reason to use it.
On the latest version of Lightroom CC I was having massive issues with performance – compared to Lightroom 4 and 5, 6/CC has always been slow since the day it was released. It’s disappointing to see that after about 12 updates to 6/CC it’s still slow, however what I did was increase Lightroom’s cache size to 10GB and that helped a lot, so if you have the space I’d recommend other people do the same for now. See https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html for instructions.
People are not listing how many photos their lightroom catalogs contain. Maybe somebodies catalog with 3500 photos is running great on their new Imac while my catalog of 350000 photos is almost impossible to work with on my 6 core mac pro with 64gb of ram ssd everything and thunderbolt II
Moved to Lightroom CC a year ago, leaving Aperture as it had been abandoned by Apple. Was immediately shocked to discover that performance across the board is an order of magnitude slower than the Apple product:
– slow browsing – any switch of folder, collection or (heaven forfend) smart collection yields wait times for data to be read and displayed. This feels like bad database engineering.
– despite holding 1:1 Previews and Smart Previews for my entire collection in a desperate attempt to up performance, image load times are still often several seconds. Also feels like bad database engineering.
– import times are slow, let alone the subsequent processing to generate the 2 types of preview Lightroom needs, and convert to DNG. This feels like bad coding optimisation.
– module switches between Library, Develop, Maps etc yield the the spinning pizza of despair. Badly optimised coding again.
– mulitprocessor support appears to be minimal.
– no CUDA support to allow the graphics card to take on some of the processing load. This is just lack of functionality.
The lack of updates since the 2015 version, leaves me worrying about Adobe’s commitment to this product in much the same way that Apple abandoned Aperture. This would be extremely frustrating, given the massive investment of time (up to and including learning to program in Lua) it took to make the transition. If Capture One added better GPS/Mapping support, I’d be tempted to leave: they do at least still seem to be committed to the space.
The focus needs to be far more on workflow, metadata, organisation and performance, and far less on photo manipulation widgetry. What is there now is already more than adequate – and if I really need big guns, well, I can round trip to Photoshop. The advantage of Lr should be a kick-arse DAM solution which, as a bonus, I don’t usually have to leave to do 80% (i.e. most common) photo manipulations. Instead I have a failed DAM solution, and a largely unused copy of Photoshop: the team have lost sight of the differentiating feature of the product, possibly because YouTube marketing videos lend themselves far more toward photo-manipulation wizardry than dull functionality that would enable me more effectively to rate, title keyword and geo-locate photos (the Map module was unususable due to a bug for four months recently).
Machine: MacPro 5,1 with Dual 6 core Xeon 5690 3.46Ghz, 48Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics, dual PCIe attached 2Tb SSD arranged RAID 0 for max performacne, dual 4K monitors.
Catalogue approx 50,000 images, including approx 10,000 4000dpi 16bit TIFF scans of negative/reversal film which are admittedly… …large.
I think they should either partner with or buyout camerabits photo mechanic and integrate it someway. Also being able to move around panels you move often to the top would also be amazing.
chop chop. I’m dying here
I think I must be the only person not having a problem with import ! …… but I don’t use it.
I use BreezeBrowser to copy images from cards to the hard-drive. It is very quick and allocates them to folders that I choose.
Then in LR, I synchronise the folder(s). It is quick enough for me. Generating thumbnails takes a while for large batches but at least you can carry on editing while it does this in it’s own time.
My main issue is browsing – every time you change image (regardless of mode – Library/developer), it can take many seconds to render a new preview.
My catalogue is spread over multiple drives and is currently 86K images. I have tried smaller catalogues with no noticeable difference in browsing.
I came in this forum to research about good hardware to use lightroom. I use today, in an old imac, 2009, core2duo, 4gb of ram, and video of 256. hahaha. It takes 4 to 5 seconds to load a photo in develop mode. I saw many testimonials from users with very powerful machines having the same loading time. how is this possible? There is something wrong with adobe. Well my dear, I want to invest $ 1.5k on a new mac to use this tool. Or should I buy a professional monitor to connect on my macbook air late 2015, 1.6GHz, 8GB, 256SSD. What will give me more performance?
Thank you so much
Michel, there’s a rumour going around the Net that says Adobe is set to discontinue Lightroom anyway, so my advise is to wait a bit and see what happens to LR, or invest in another editing program that will work with your existing hardware. The Adobe CC subscription plan was, in my mind, a ploy to get finance coming in to bolster a piece of software that was reaching it’s natural end. Who is going to pay for, what is basically, 12-year old software that has few, if any, useful upgrades? And doesn’t seem to work well with 21st-century hardware!
While I agree with your point about 12 year old software with incremental small-ish upgrades.. I disagree about them discontinuing it. Photoshop is a major program, and it camera raw module will always be updated – which in turn is relatively easy to port back to Lightroom. If suscriptions were a ploy to get more money before discontinuing the program – then Adobe must be discontuing their entire product line and going out of business.
BTW – there’s a rumor that LR 7 will be released tomorrow. People are spreading that rumor, so it must be true. 😉
Hi all,
I have been suffering so long with Lightroom performance; is it wise to invest in the new iMac Pro who will be released in December?
Or should I wait for any Lightroom update?
Thanks,
in regards to hope to get better performance? nope. LR is slow regardless of system spec.
so … This year? or should I just delete and cancel Lightroom and use one of the other alternatives?
It might seem like a retrograde step, but you could consider buying, from a well known online auction site, an old copy of LR 4.0. This, strangely, seems to work better than the latest ‘upgrade’ but with some reduced functionality of course. However I’m not a good person to ask as I’m running an ‘old’ processor, quite small batches of images and I’m not time-limited. If you are a semi-pro with hundreds of images to process at a stretch, then I appreciate your frustration.
When can we expect significant improvement to the speed within Library and Develop modules?
Maybe they’ve already rewritten the worst parts of the code, and are just polling to see which parts to release first?
So, I have found a work around to the slowness issue of Lightroom. Also, this confirms our suspicion that Lightroom fails to leverage the extra cores in high end PCs.
—-
TL;DR; – I created a virtualized Windows 7 x64 machine and installed Lightroom on it. It ran blazingly fast on my monstrously overpowered PC, instead of insanely slow like it had when it was installed directly to the host OS.
—-
** I set the cores to 4 and memory to 4GB. Works great.
** Then I set the cores to 6 and left the memory at 4GB. Things got noticeably slower.
** Then, 8 cores and 4GB, horrendously slow.
—-
For those looking to do the same, here are the steps.
— 1. Install Virtualbox (or something similar). It’s free and a very powerful tool.
— 2. Create a new Windows 7 64 bit installation (haven’t tested 32 bit)
—- a) Set memory to 4GB+
—- b) Set CPU cores to 2 or 4 (whatever you can spare)
—- c) Set the virtual HDD size to a reasonable amount for photo editing
— 3. Install the Virtualbox guest disk (drivers for the virtual machine)
— 4. Install Lightroom
— 5. Set up folder sharing or direct USB access (to access your images)
— 6. Test Lightroom
— 7. Switch to Fullscreen or Unity mode and edit away!
——
This all worked for me and I’m back and able to work quickly. However, it’s ridiculous that I had to do all of this just to get Lightroom to function normally. (Adobe, fix your $#@&!!!)
—–
P.S. Another benefit for me was uninstall all Adobe Creative Cloud services and applications. So now, if I don’t want all that extra crap (unkillable services, Node, licensing, etc…) to be running, I just turn off the virtual machine. Done and I’m back to a clean running host OS. 😀
Lightroom Performance?
It would be a nice start to provide an update on this blog post-what are Adobe’s plans to improve Lr performance?
In what areas? When? or lay out a plan for users.
I am sure Adobe don’t need too many suggestions for parts of Lr to speed up. I’m sure you have all the logs/metrics you need. Start at the core and work out from there 😉
So, I have found a work around to the slowness issue of Lightroom. Also, this confirms our suspicion that Lightroom fails to leverage the extra cores in high end PCs.
—-
TL;DR; – I created a virtualized Windows 7 x64 machine and installed Lightroom on it. It ran blazingly fast on my monstrously overpowered PC, instead of insanely slow like it had when it was installed directly to the host OS.
—-
** I set the cores to 4 and memory to 4GB. Works great.
** Then I set the cores to 6 and left the memory at 4GB. Things got noticeably slower.
** Then, 8 cores and 4GB, horrendously slow.
—-
For those looking to do the same, here are the steps.
— 1. Install Virtualbox (or something similar). It’s free and a very powerful tool.
— 2. Create a new Windows 7 64 bit installation (haven’t tested 32 bit)
—- a) Set memory to 4GB+
—- b) Set CPU cores to 2 or 4 (whatever you can spare)
—- c) Set the virtual HDD size to a reasonable amount for photo editing
— 3. Install the Virtualbox guest disk (drivers for the virtual machine)
— 4. Install Lightroom
— 5. Set up folder sharing or direct USB access (to access your images)
— 6. Test Lightroom
— 7. Switch to Fullscreen or Unity mode and edit away!
——
This all worked for me and I’m back and able to work quickly. However, it’s ridiculous that I had to do all of this just to get Lightroom to function normally. (Adobe, fix your $#@&!!!)
—–
P.S. Another benefit for me was uninstall all Adobe Creative Cloud services and applications. So now, if I don’t want all that extra crap (unkillable services, Node, licensing, etc…) to be running, I just turn off the virtual machine. Done and I’m back to a clean running host OS.
*** Stop blocking my post ***
So, I have found a work around to the slowness issue of Lightroom. Also, this confirms our suspicion that Lightroom fails to leverage the extra cores in high end PCs.
—-
TL;DR; – I created a virtualized Windows 7 x64 machine and installed Lightroom on it. It ran blazingly fast on my monstrously overpowered PC, instead of insanely slow like it had when it was installed directly to the host OS.
—-
** I set the cores to 4 and memory to 4GB. Works great.
** Then I set the cores to 6 and left the memory at 4GB. Things got noticeably slower.
** Then, 8 cores and 4GB, horrendously slow.
—-
For those looking to do the same, here are the steps.
— 1. Install Virtualbox (or something similar). It’s free and a very powerful tool.
— 2. Create a new Windows 7 64 bit installation (haven’t tested 32 bit)
—- a) Set memory to 4GB+
—- b) Set CPU cores to 2 or 4 (whatever you can spare)
—- c) Set the virtual HDD size to a reasonable amount for photo editing
— 3. Install the Virtualbox guest disk (drivers for the virtual machine)
— 4. Install Lightroom
— 5. Set up folder sharing or direct USB access (to access your images)
— 6. Test Lightroom
— 7. Switch to Fullscreen or Unity mode and edit away!
——
This all worked for me and I’m back and able to work quickly. However, it’s ridiculous that I had to do all of this just to get Lightroom to function normally. (Adobe, fix your $#@&!!!)
—–
P.S. Another benefit for me was uninstall all Adobe Creative Cloud services and applications. So now, if I don’t want all that extra crap (unkillable services, Node, licensing, etc…) to be running, I just turn off the virtual machine. Done and I’m back to a clean running host OS.
Apologies. Both moderators were unavailable for a period of time. All backlogged moderated comments have been reviewed and released (including your three iterations of this post).
Ah. Thanks for the update. Mind sharing my experience and testing in regards to performance with the others on the Adobe team? Thanks!
This decade?
Can you fix this pos already? Even my mouse cursor is lagging like it’s getting a heart attack when trying to do something in Lightroom. Soon I will too I think.
LR CC is just a lot slower then everything else out there doing the same thing…..photos, C1….seems like everything that used to be a PS plug in now has a library function with aperture going away and LR being just so slow…
regardless of system it takes 10?x longer for LR to import from card and make previews then C1…..and then it is a lot slower to actually edit and scroll through….
my workflow at this point is to do a rough edit, and make 1:1 previews at that point, at least i can then go trough faster and check things like focus and such to come up with a final edit….
i am really liking LR but the speed is a huge issue and i honestly don’t understand why it has to be so slow when everybody else is so much faster….
Win 10 64 Bit, 16 gig, I7 4790K 4.0 Ghz, M.2 SSD and I have to restart every 10 min for glorious editing until it grinds to alt again. Killing my productivity 🙁 Vga turned off, but makes no difference on or off really…I’m lost for words 🙁
Using a 10-core/20-thread processor, import is limited to a single thread maxed at 100%, and the NVMe storage is practically idle (importing/copying from/to a local folder).
I have to join the moaning…as my daily pain is huge!
I bought a Threadripper 1950X with plenty of cores, 32GB 3200MHz RAM and a Nvidia 1080 TI OC 11GB and a Samsung 960 PRO 1 TB + my old 2×850 SSDs – as I thought I could improve speed in Lightroom & Premiere Pro significantly.
In fact, almost the opposite was the case! Coming from Intel 4770K – i get the same laggy experience.
GPU-acceleration??? What is this menu entry causing? Whatever I do in Lightroom, I see no GPU-Load exceeding 10% of my enthusiast gfx card…
PLEASE MAKE OUR VOICES HEARD FAST – Adobe, you got way overtaken by hardware tech evolution… time to catch up urgently!
Suffering each day,
Birigt
Bought the best iMac you can buy this week. Lightroom is a pig on just 700 photos in libaray. It has the responsiveness that Flash used to have! Shocking product. I’m actually considering switching to something else as Adobe doesn’t even seem to address the issue exists.
Just got a new system a 44 core xeon processor and two titain Xp, 128 GB Momory, 2 SD Drive One for OS (2TB) and (1TB) Projects and the other dedicated for caching… Lightroom just does not work at all, it sooo slow… Anyone have any ideals of what is going on with lightroom?
Especially for people with lower mhz, multicore or multisocket systems, go check out C1 to sample the performance you expect. 64 core xeon machine here; Capture One has real good threading, i’m seeing max load on 64 cores at times. No sticky (and bigger) sliders, good threading on image editing. Quick and consistent image browsing and loading. It all feels way better, realtime.This is how it should be, especially on higher end systems.
I generally love the lightroom interface but the speed is killing me so i’m switching. I have the idea that lightroom spawns a lot of threads but has no idea how to properly use them. Changing CPU affinity to fewer cores seems to help, for instance.
I’ve switched to using:
XnViewMP for culling (works blazingly fast and full featured)
Testing Capture One and Affinity Photo for editing
—
Adobe, I’m sorry, you guys waited too long to fix this issue. Consider me another lost customer.
Thought I’d let you know I’ve installed XnView and I’m more impressed than I thought I would be. Not quite the functionality of LR but quite fast and well worth looking at. Thanks for the tip.
Adobe Moderators: Please help.
What can we do to improve performance using Lightroom? I’ve tried the following:
* Using an SSD
* Increasing cache size
* Always creating a new catalog and never going over 4000 images on an import
* File Handling > Smaller Preview Size
* Minimal previews
* Smart previews
* GPU acceleration
* Update drivers
* Removing all plugins
* Turned off XMP
* Minimize spot heals/adjustments
—–
Specs: 6th gen i7, 64GB of DDR4, NVMe SSD, Windows 10, GTX 1070
—-
Here’s the workflow and the slowdowns experienced:
* Imports – I always Add with minimal previews set, no smart previews (never copy and especially never copy as DNG as it takes too damn long). Previews take awhile to generate, but overall this process isn’t bad as long as the number of images isn’t huge.
* Cull – In Library mode, sifting through the RAW (80D & 5DM3) images the “Loading” message appears as I move through the images. Can take 2 – 5 seconds per image.
* Remove unwanted images – Seems to process just fine
* Develop – Gets worse over time. It’ll start out with 1 – 3 second delays switching images, but as I make adjustments to the images, let’s say only 150 images in the catalog, it becomes unbearably slow only about 10 to 15 images in. Every time I move a slider, I have to wait.
* Presets – While I have about 200 presets loaded and available, I might use one every once in awhile. I try to not use presets as much as possible to give my images a more realistic feel.
* Copying develop settings – I use this all the time and it runs surprisingly well. No complaints here. But sifting through images in develop mode is still a huge pain.
* Export – Normally, it runs fine. Every once in awhile it will create these duplicate files. The duplicates are broken and cannot be opened. The duplicates will have in their name part of the original name of the file from the camera. It’s really bizarre and there seems to be no rhyme or reason. Exporting 100 images will generate about 3 – 5 of these and I use Windows to quickly delete them.
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Here’s the thing. I’m an IT administrator by day, so I know how to keep a clean running OS. It’s not like I have 200 running processes in the background (although, Creative Cloud does create like 25 processes of its own **angry face**).
Why is this running so damn slow?
Hi from Russia.
Glad to join discussion.
Lightroom pefomance is awfull. Not bad, awfull.
I have i7700k, 32RAM. Lightroom use only 2-3gb of ram, and 10% of cpu, it even cant utilize my pc which i bought especially for lightroom and photoshop. Camera raw have same absolutely fucntions and engine – utilizing 70% of CPU, and even this is not enough, why it wouldn’t use 100% like all normal programs, and all ram? In camera raw i can use curves, everything is running perfetctly. In lightroom (same engine) i cant even use CURVES. LOL. Library in camera raw working fine and fast. In lightroom its just lagging ethernally rather than work.
Photoshop working with bullet speed, camera raw with bullet speed, capture one with bullet speed, 3dLUT with bullet speed, and lightroom, with having primitive functional of 2005 photo editing program cant run properly? Why using 10% of CPU max? Why using 2gb of ram max? I have 32, lightroom its all for you, my i7700 is for you, no you still lagging.
Also what is funny is occasions when LR on one systems of one guys working good, than start running slow (read sierra lightroom lag topic on adobe forum). I looking in internet on guys vids with lightroom, and they have very fast working curves and lr. I have powerfull clean PC (7700k/32gb), with good system clean from any viruses. And they have perfect working curves and i checking eveything, every little setting in lightroom and cant find reason. And what for i must look lag’s reason? Other programs aint lag. Capture one running perfect, camera raw running bullet speed, photoshop also, 3d lut with functionality 25x better than lightroom is working with cosmic speed. RAW, TIFF, JPG. everything is running top speed in every colorgrading software, ecxept for lightroom. EVEN CURVES AINT RUNNING NORMAL I CANT USE THEM. WHY JUST WHY?
i see lightroom as very good program. yes its primitive in its functional but its good library. lt isnt good for photo editing by its functional (just take a look at “3DLUT Creator”) but its simple good program with good library and many presests libraries for it, which making it pretty enjoyable, IF NOT LAGS, WHICH MAKES LIGHTROOM FULLY OBSOLETE AS PROGRAM. i gonna use anything now but not lightroom for colorgrading. anything. capture one is sa,e and better. simply best. just no lags, same systym, same fucntionality, same photos and BULLET SPEED OF WORK. the only thing i aadicted is prestes and my library, but that not a big deal, as big as not to swithc to anothe software. I dont have time to fight woth adobe lightroom bugs, I need to work, leaving my time for productivity, not suffering from lightroom lags nightmare.
Thank you adobe for lightroom and see ya, when you fixing bugs. Yes using other programs from scratch would be pain, i have presets library, i have my shots library, but times changed, i had enough pain adobe.
3dlut, capture one, and ps combination is my choice by now.
Hey, its me again. Just installed DXO, and its run with cosmic smooth speed. And what is most frustrated me: my freind bought less powerfull pc. 16gb ran instead of 32 and less fast cpu. no gpu like i do have. and you know what? he have win10 like me. and his lightroom running with cosmic speed. COSMIC like speed of light of something like this. catalog working fast. and this is what frustrating me most of all. btw i reading russian forums. heh. guys saying: 1) lr started randomly lag then randomly stopped 2) i deleted lr fonts from lr fonts folder lags dissapeared 3) i enabled smooth fonts options lags dissapeared 4) guy have very powerfull MAC lr worked fast than randomly started lags he cant find any solution 5) lr lagged ccleaner helped (few guys said this)
from western forums what i found: 1) guy had lags on very powerfull pc, reinstalled drivers for video card (nvidia) everything started work very fast kek
3dlut wich is better than lr 25x times working 25x times faster without any bugs. LOOOL
its 2017 adobe. and its like you living in 2007
Unfortunately, it’s time to join the discussion in case another voice will prompt Adobe to at least respond!
My six year old Macbook Pro recently died and I made the switch a high end Windows PC: more and faster RAM, faster SSD, faster processor, faster video card, and…. Lightroom runs much slower in every way! Note, it was slow on my MB Pro too, but I never imagined it would know be even slower. This is so frustrating. I’ve tried many of the suggestions to make it run faster (smart previews, large Adobe Raw cash, etc.). I’ve also had it as a CC version and now a standalone LR 6 version and there is no change. I am now ready to abandon LR altogether. I feel sorry for all of you that are pros and have to endure this.
Well, since they are not responding here, we should probably go back to the bug forums.
Adobe,
Please make Lightroom slower. My photography jobs aren’t taking long enough.
Cheers!
Adobe, please do someting w/ LR performence! Runnig 100k photos library on 2GB/s SSD, 16GB RAM and quad-core i5 and most of the tasks is expremely slow!
– Preview loading/building
– Importing
– Scrolling (<1FPS)
– Loading RAW files
– LR is super slow while exporting/previews buld/atc. — while other apps works diring that time just fine!
I just upgraded to a new 5K Retina iMac, in the hope that Lightroom would run faster. Nope. If anything, slower. It’s a 27″ model with 40gigs of Ram, the best graphics card and a 3TB SSD. The catalogue and RAW files are on the SSD. I am a professional photographer and use Lightroom every day. Lightroom’s performance is so disappointing! I really hope it’s fixed sometime soon.
Adobe
Any update on progress. I’m seriously considering alternative solutions as I just can’t be doing editing for 5 hours every night, a job I should be able to finish in 2.
Turning off DNG conversions helps as does disabling lens correction and straightening, but really what is the point of adding features that people cannot use?
Thanks
what is the timeline for this? this year? this decade? next decade?
as russian i could say promise aint mean nothing until it done. so just dont wait. search for alternative solutions and work with them. use XMP and correct files in camera raw as simple solution. other are well known – dxp c1 and niche solutions as 3dlut. my friend bought pc less powefull then mine. lr aint lag all run perfect. my pc much more powerfull and lr lagging so much that i cant work. caleb systen everything is clean. all other progams including camera raw working very fast. its not mine of your problem. its problem of adobe. they must fix it or they would be next “too big to fail” nokia
And today’s release is yet more proof that Adobe couldn’t give two shits about the customer.
i need stable program withput bugs. this version is good step forward but curves still aint fixed. little window of curves, curves lagging, cursor aint dissapearing while moving curve. its awfull. curves window must be 3x bigger and smooth as dove doe. curves is main instrument for work. and they are 50% useless in current lightroom. JUST WHY ADOBE??? just why please??? also adobe need to move forward and make lightroom classic 2017 instrument insted of still being 2005 pack of instruments for colograding. lol its not even one good fucntion from that times. i dont saying about photoshop its still in 2003, but lol just look at 3dlut guys. ITS WHAT COLORGRADING OF 2017 LOOK LIKE, not you primitive program. “3DLUT” ADOBE MANAGER GO AND LOOK WHAT IT IS. AND SEND IT TO YOUR CEO. THIS IS 2017. YOU STILL IN 2005 FOR NOW. cheers from russia mates.
i for real considering switching to 3dlut from lightroom forever caus lightroom aint meet interests of common photographer for 2017. aint meet at all.
and i dont even saying that even with current upgrade of 18 october 3dlut working like 10x times faster then lightroom. thats just a shame adobe. just a shame. cheers
LR Classic is worse.
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It crashes regularly.
The “Loading” appears all the time.
In Develop, images take over 7 – 10 seconds to load on scroll.
In Develop, sometimes the images never load.
Sometimes the “Loading” message never goes away.
Crop tool spazzes out.
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i7-6800K, Win10, 32GB, NVMe SSD….
This is incredibly frustrating!
I agree. I have old PC, but “Old” Lightroom CC was faster. After a while it is so slow.
It may be totally unconnected with the LR performance issues, but I’ve noticed recently, on doing a hard-disk defrag, that I had many thousands (>10000) of fragmented files, most of which seemed connected with the LR install/update. It may be worth anyone to perform a defrag to see if this helps.
Ok, its about half-years pass and what we see? Adobe make absolutly nothing. LR, probably, works even worst then older version.
And its very easy to describe – subscribtion model very good for do nothing – you still have great money effort and you dont have any reason for really improve your badly slow app. Of curse, official story tell you “we instantly impreove your apps and add more feauteres” but try to remeber – when last helpful tools was added? Something from 2014-2015 im guess. And about 2-3 years you montly pay for what? Yes, for nothing. Now its clear, why standalone version killed 🙂
You dont like this huge laggs? Sorry, better PC not help, its tested many times. Only thing you can do with it – stop paying adobe for nothing. Sad by true – until we pay for nothing, nothing changed.
Quite right Alexander. We pay for the ‘privelege’ of using LR for the rest of our lives, if we get new features or none! The answer, as you say, is to stop subscribing and then see what happens. I read a blog where it is mentioned that Adobe are thinking of scrapping LR anyway. Watch this space….