P: Disable smart collection

Thanks, it will probably take me a day or so to look at this in detail.

Thanks John,

90,000 images and Lightroom Classic is fully up-to-date (7.0.1) and catalogue converted. It is on a reasonably fast Windows 10 PC with 16GB. Not much else runs concurrently. LR is on a HD, not a SSD.

Right now I have 12 SC (Smart Collections) similar to the two in the attached zip file in one set, then the group is repeated for each camera and lens combination. Previously they were a little more complex

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kh80r9f0gs7v4g2/LR.zip?dl=0

BTW The lens description in the image file is "EF24-105mm f/4L IS USM", it might be faster if I searched for the full description but I can imagine instances where limiting it to some embedded text is preferable, eg to include different versions of a 50mm lens.

Each group takes over 2 minutes to process before the numbers appear. If I close LR and re-open it immediately it takes 20 seconds to refill them. But by the next day when I start LR it is back to over 2 mins per group.

I would like to keep many SC sets active (or disabled if that was an option) so I didn't have to edit and re-edit each time for each new criteria, e.g. date ranges, lens type, camera number etc. but as they are so slow I have now deleted all but one set.

(I do have some other SCs but they are quick to resolve)

It would be even better if a group could select from another smart collection, eg SC 2 selects all images for a camera and lens type, then each SC in a group pull from SC 2 and refine that selection by, say aperture value range. That would make setting up groups much easier and I would only need to change SC 2 to get the next batch of figures.

"This background process takes about 5 minutes and slows down LR."

There have been very few posts in the last many years about very slow smart collections.  It would be good to narrow down what it is about your situation causing this.

- How many photos in your catalog?

- Has your catalog been upgraded from previous major versions, and if so, which ones?

- Can you right-click each smart collection and do Export Smart Collection Settings.  Zip up the 12 .lrsmcol files, upload to Dropbox or similar, and post the sharing link here.  I'm intimately familiar with LR's search capabilities (see my Any Filter plugin), so I might be able to identify a culprit.

Hi Johan, you are quite right. But I find that my smart collections, I have about 12, are rebuilt every time LR starts. This background process takes about 5 minutes and slows down LR. I have read that some users have a lot more smart collections. I imagine they are just simple SQL statements and thus selecting on an index-able criteria like the "star rating number column" then they will be very quick. But if using a CONTAINS or LIKE search (e.g. lens criteria text column contains "24-105") they take a lot longer as they need to read all rows in the database rather than using a pre-built index.

Coming back to your initial question: I doubt that turning off smart collections would make Lightroom significantly faster. When Lightroom starts, it needs to run the query for each smart collection. That is why you see the image count behind your smart collections appear not instantly, but (depending on the size of the catalog) after a few seconds. But after that, when you change the criteria of an image, Lightroom only needs to check that one particular image against the smart collections. When I change an image from 4 stars to 5 starts, I see my four star and five star smart collections update instantly. BTW, my catalog contains 170,000 images.

Yes, I believe that a possible never ending loop is indeed one of the reasons why Adobe did not implement searching for images in another smart collection. The other reason is that this is functionality that already exists anyway. You can simply include the criteria of smart collection B in the criteria of smart collection A. It may be a little more work, but in the end it's exactly the same result.

The problem with feature suggestions is that people can suggest anything they like. Thy don't have to check how difficult it is to add this to the existing code. They don't have to check wether Lightroom would become even more bloatware with all these features. They don't have to check whether more than a handful of people might ever use this. And of course they always think that their feature request is the most important request in the history of Lightroom and so it is unbelievable that it is still not implemented...