P: Import stuck on checking free space on disk

@Rikk I have been using the latest version of Lightroom CC (4.1) with great success, but today I just started having this same issue when adding items to my library.

Here's what's happening:

When adding photos to the library, I select the images to import, click "Review for Import." Here, it can take 20 minutes or longer for big folders (~6,000 items), but eventually it shows me the images for review, and I check "Select All" and click "Add Photos." After that, I see this message on the upper right corner of the screen:  "Checking free space on disk". This message stays up for ages -- 30-40 minutes, sometimes much longer -- before the images finally start getting added to the library. 

This slow performance just started; I've been doing a series of large imports (4-6,000 items) previously that had worked fine. Since the problem started, I've tried testing with much smaller imports (10 images). The review / select process is much faster (instantaneous instead of 20+ minutes), but then it gets stuck Checking free space on disk for ages. 

My setup: 

• iMac with 32 GB RAM
• Mac OS Big Sur 11.2
• Lightroom CC 4.1
• 72GB free space available on system drive
• 1.6 TB free space available on external USB3 drive
• My library contains just over 192,000 items, a mix of RAW, jpg, heic, png, etc., along with videos in various formats
• I store a copy of my originals on a 4GB external APFS-formatted USB3 hard drive (local, not a NAS). 

Are there any known issues using APFS formatted external drives to store originals? 

Or have I hit some threshold where my library has grown too large? It now contains over 192,000 items which take up about 1.7 TB on Lightroom's cloud storage (and on my external drive).

Do you have any workarounds or advice? I'm happy to try further testing or troubleshooting the problem. I appreciate your help with this!

-- br

@Rikk

Wow, that is what I've been waiting for!

Improved user interface (e.g. albums box) and most importantly finally the performance is on par with Lightroom Classic! Many thanks! Now please add the print module and I can finally decommission the Classic 6.0 version 🙂 

@Rikk  thanks for coming back to it (although 2 years later 😉 I'll install it, luckily, I was not facing this issue anymore since a while. I hope that overall performance will be dramatically improved though.

Alright it's not showing up yet in Creative cloud... but i'll wait until it does. Thanks Rik. 

Install 4.0 which was released today. It should fix your issue. 

@Rikk this is happening to me on version 3.4, , Mac OS 10.14.6, 15" Macbook Pro 2tb SSD

Greetings,

Updates for the Adobe Photography Products were officially released on 10.20.2020 that include fixes for this issue. Please install the most recent update and confirm that your issue is now fixed. Please let us know if you encounter any issues.

Thank you for your patience.

Same for me. I can't use Lightroom anymore at this point.

I have a 2TB SSD and it's been stuck on checking free space for 2 hours now. 

It happens with every single photo I try to import. So at this moment this software is just completely useless to me 😞

First time Lightroom user: same problem: "Checking free space on disk"

Never ending....