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Known Participant
June 13, 2011
Open for Voting

P: Ability to set up a queue up and schedule several tasks at a time when not by your computer

  • June 13, 2011
  • 47 replies
  • 2141 views

OK, I'm not sure I can describe this good. But sometimes LR is slow when you start a few tasks, like exporting images to jpgs, web galleries, etc, that you wish that those could be done at a time when you're not by your computer (say at a coffee break, lunch or even leaving the office for the day).

It would be cool with a feature where you could queue several tasks, that can be done when the computer is having "down time" or when you tell it to "start processing task queue" or similar.

Or a possibility for third party vendors to script something like this (or even yourself if you're fairly good as scripting).

47 replies

Sean H [Seattle branch]
Known Participant
September 4, 2014
Can we get an "in progress" tag on this post from the Adobe crew? This is such a useful idea to delay CPU-intensive stuff until I'm away.

1. Exports
2. 1:1 previews
3. Smart preview building
4. iPad App sync

The queue would monitor and report success/fail. +1 for LR realizing my mouse isn't moving and starts chewing on the queue.

Heaven.
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Legend
October 23, 2013
Ben said it was a good feature request. Team added it to their backlog.
Known Participant
October 23, 2013
Thanks. All the bug reports and feature requests I put in just get deferred without dialog...
Legend
October 23, 2013
I've asked someone on the LR team on what the behavior should be or if this is possible. I was just trying to provide a solution that you could use immediately.
Known Participant
October 23, 2013
Jeff let me elaborate a little further. Naturally I know that I can, and have to, disable sleeping before these long import sessions. My point is that pros can't keep going back and forth to do this all the time. Last night I forgot to when I started importing 3600 images - I was tired after a long shoot. But I need that card for todays shoot and now it's not available because the process stopped. We need smart solutions to those and other problems - not band-aides. My question is simple - "Can LR tell the OS not to sleep during this process?"
Known Participant
October 23, 2013
Yes, of course but it's not only a hassle to change the System Preferences for every LR import session, leaving the preferences that way (which is inevitable) would defeat the whole purpose of saving energy. That's an unfair burden to put on laptop users. My point is that it would be far better is LR could prevent the MAC OS from sleeping during this process. Is that a possibility?
Legend
October 23, 2013
You can certainly do it from the System Preferences under the Energy Saver panel.
Known Participant
October 23, 2013
I started importing 3600 photos last night and am now discovering that the computer went to sleep around 1600. Can LR tell the computer not to go to sleep during this process?

I'm seeing lots of issues when dealing with large sessions like this. For example, when I develop and sync a large number of images, all the new previews aren't generated for the images. To elaborate, if you sync the development settings for 1000 images and then goto Grid mode you can watch it update the previews for the visible grid of images and then the CPU goes idle. But when you scroll down to the next grid section it will only then start to render those previews and then again go idle. Why won't the CPU stay busy and render all the previews? The "Update DNG previews and Metadata" feature takes far, far longer (unreasonably long for this process) than simply scrolling though the grid to get the previews to update. Without having these previews updated its difficult to use Loupe mode.

I could go on, but I feel like these are the details that really matter to those of us with demanding 1000+ image import sessions and 1000+ item develop sync sessions but are easy to get overlooked with the smaller import sessions that are so common with consumer workflows. I'd love to see Adobe focus on making LR more robust for demanding pro workflows.
Participant
October 23, 2013


It would be absolutely fantastic if Lightroom could take on some sort of background rendering capabilities. Maybe it could take a note from it's motion picture cousin, After Effects, and have this ability come through Adobe's Media Encoder. (FWIW, AE already has at least one other, 3rd party, background rendering mechanism.)

I'm a *busy* editor for a destination wedding photographer. When I finish an edit and start exporting 1,200 jpegs, I would love to start editing in a new catalog immediately. I'm certain there are many others out there that could benefit from this flexibility.
Known Participant
October 23, 2013


First, let me say that Lightroom is becoming an incredible tool for creating time lapse videos. These videos often have long render times and Lightroom's ability to multitask is fantastic. I like to cue up a video to render while I prepare the next one. Eventually there are several tasks in progress and the total time it takes for them to complete grows.

I like the way we can cycle through the several tasks that are in progress and choose "X" or stop them if we like. My request would be add the option of pausing a process so that others can continue with greater speed. I could see video professionals queuing up dozens of videos to render and having a little more management of these processes would be nice.