P: Lightroom Classic v15.4/15.4.1 Causes AI Assist Culling Memory Leaks, Mac Freezes, and Denoise Failures

My situation:

• Lightroom Classic 15.5
• macOS Tahoe 26.6
• Mac Studio M4 Max, 36 GB unified memory
• Sony a7R V, 61 MP RAW
• Untouched RAW: ~2.5 GB combined Lightroom cache
• Denoise/AI-edited RAW: ~17 GB combined cache
• Lightroom retains the ~17 GB processed image after navigating to another photo
• GPU allocation rose as high as 28.45 / 28.75 GB (98%)
• Swap reached 11.86 GB
• Entire macOS UI became extremely sluggish
• Fresh 10-photo catalog reproduced the large allocation after Denoise + AI mask
• Main catalog can allocate ~23 GB immediately after opening, before making new edits
• GPU Preview Generation OFF
• HDR Library OFF
• Same workflow performed normally until recently

This is still occurring in Lightroom Classic 15.5, even though 15.5 contains fixes related to excessive memory usage. My reproduction does not require Assisted Culling. Denoise + AI masking on 61 MP Sony RAW files is sufficient to trigger extremely high GPU/unified-memory allocation.

Greetings all,  
 
A new update for the Adobe Photography products has been released.  The August release (x.5) contains an update regarding this issue.  

If you do not see the update in your Creative Cloud Application, you can refresh it by pressing  [Ctrl/Cmd]+[Alt/Opt]+[ R ]. 

Note: It may take up to 24 hours for your update to be available in your Creative Cloud app.
 
Thank you for being so patient.  

Description of Issue:
Lightroom Classic crashes repeatedly during Assisted Culling / Auto Analysis when processing a large catalog (~118,000 photos). The crash occurs after several thousand photos have been analyzed (first crash at photo ~5786-5820 range in one session, second crash at photo 112246 in another). Windows Event Viewer logged a "Resource-Exhaustion-Detector" warning (Event ID 2004) shortly before one crash, showing Lightroom.exe alone consuming 44,277,784,576 bytes (~44.2 GB) of virtual memory, alongside excire-search.exe and Dropbox.exe. A subsequent test with the Excire Search plugin fully disabled still showed continuous, near-linear memory growth during Assisted Culling (virtual memory committed rising ~2.9 GB over 78 seconds), and the app crashed again shortly after, with Windows Application Error logging Exception code 0xc0000374 (STATUS_HEAP_CORRUPTION) in ntdll.dll. A first, separate crash produced Exception code 0xc0000005 (ACCESS_VIOLATION) with the crash backtrace pointing into AgRedeye_load. GPU and CPU temperatures were verified normal throughout (GPU max 66.4°C, well under thermal limit; no PCIe errors logged) via HWiNFO64 sensor logging, ruling out a thermal or hardware cause.

Lightroom Classic Version Number: 15.4.1.1 (build 202606201310-b9f148a4)

OS Version Number: Windows 11 Home, version 11.0.26200

Camera Model: Multiple (mixed smartphone and camera sources, GPS-tagged photos)

Step-by-step Reproduction Instructions:

1. Open a catalog with approximately 100,000+ photos
2. Enable Auto Analysis / Assisted Culling (via Identity Plate menu) with Address Lookup enabled
3. Let the analysis run in the background across the full catalog
4. Wait — crash occurs after a variable number of photos processed (observed between ~5,800 and ~112,000 photos into the run)
5. Crash reproduces both with the Excire Search third-party plugin enabled and disabled

The Expected Result: Assisted Culling analysis completes the full catalog without crashing, with stable memory usage throughout.

The Actual Result: Lightroom Classic crashes with an unhandled exception (0xc0000005 or 0xc0000374 depending on the run), consistent with progressive memory corruption/leak during the Assisted Culling background analysis process.

My guess is that they rushed the release out the door before their July break, where most of the American teams are on vacation.