And don't be surprised if they come kick your door in if you say anything bad about them. ... View more

To those ppl who are bashing rossi for using the Beta, THEN upgrading to the release version, THEN wishing he could easily go back to 2.7... You've got it all wrong. Its NOT his fault for LR sucking. The blame is sqaurely with adobe. He did everything right. He tried to software, liked it, patiently waited for the even better release. Who on this list didn't? He then bought the software, spent hours upgrading...then...realized he had been tricked out of his time, effort, and money. Unfortanately he is trapped now...either direction will cost a lot of time and frustration. Who's fault? Adobe. Poor planning. Poor testing. Disregard for customer base. The only fault I see of rossi is not simply returning the software. He would still have a fully functional copy of LR 3 that he could buy back in the near future if adobe gets a fix out. ... View more

Thank you for raising this point. Where is the data? I keep hearing Adobe cheerleaders saying that everything is A.O.K. for mostly everyone. How are they convincing themselves of this? Or is this just a divide and conquer strategy for dealing with this toxic software spill? Clearly Adobe doesn't have all the facts straight or they wouldn't have released this in the first place...unless they intended to use their paying user base as Beta testers. I don't think they would do that, but you have to wonder. Could it be that that someone over there is misinterpreting user acceptance and that is why they are OK with the product as released? Maybe they are holding the chart upside down. How can they possibly say that most users are having a positive experience? Where's the hard data to support this conjecture? They should post that data to this thread so we all know for sure that we are just the vocal minority. Clearly something is wrong, because this is the third version of this software that has been a horrible experience out of the gate. I really hope they make an effort to do something differently for version 4.0, even if that means a slower release cycle. They need to hold themselves to a higher standard. Many people count of this software to work as advertised, and don't have hours and hours and hours to "try to fix it". They really need someone over there at Adobe to say "No Way! We are NOT going to release crappy software to our photographers!" Where is that voice? Who has that role at Adobe? If there isn't anyone specifically doing that role, or they don't have the power to make change, or they have a different agenda, then there clearly is a problem with the development/release process. As a buyer, your best option is to return the software by simply clicking the appropriate link your account or making a 5 minute phone call...and DONE. Do it today. Do you (Adobe) have empirical evidence of this, or is it simply that only a minority of users are using this forum or the bug system to report problems? If there IS evidence from a majority of people (and by people I mean actual, real users that are doing real work with the tool, not just staring at rows of thumbnails in their 500 image catalog) that there is no problem we need to know what they're doing differently. ... View more

Also moving from and image in library to an image in develop is slow. And cropping an image is slow. Imports are also slow. The issues I see from here are: > 1) Moving from image to image in Develop can be slow. 2) Moving from image to image in Library can be slow. 3) Using Local Adjustments can be slow 4) using the spot tool can be slow 5) Exports can be slow > ... View more

Buying a new mac won't help anyway, or at least it didn't in my case. Adobe needs to fix it, not wait until, or expect me to, buy a new Mac. ... View more

"Oh give a rest, will you? We get it - you're not happy. Get over it." ... View more

"But these figures further serve to make your point - the complaints on here cannot be taken with any certainty as being representative of the overall user experience out there: and bear in mind too that some of us have posted to say that all is well in Lr land for us." You should start a post "OMG. I can you believe how SMOKING FAST lightroom is!?!?" Then we'll have an apples to apple comparison. ... View more

Done. Thanks for the link. ... View more

I don't think it should be up to the end users to report problems, especially when they are so blatantly obvious. That's what beta-testers are for. They had plenty of warning while the product was still in beta to know that it wasn't up to snuff. This is a perfect opportunity to vote with your dollars. If the software isn't working, get a refund, and wait until they fix it before you pay for it again. ... View more

"This is a 27 inch iMac.  How did you solve the problem?" I solved my problem by returning my copy of LR3. I'm just going to wait it out. .7 is the new .0 ... View more

You can get a refund. Just call in and tell them what is going on ... View more

Is this a 27inch iMac? Not sure that it matters, but LR was very slow on my imac 27in/i7. ... View more

Seriously you should all just return your software if you want results fast. I returned mine. To adobe's credit, It's pretty straight forward through the web interface. You might have to call in if it is over 30 days. At this rate, I'll be glad to purchase it again when it is in version 3.7 ... View more

Thank you for the pointer to this info. This is VERY helpful for understanding what is going on in the background. A couple things to note here: 1. Screen size is NOT the same thing as optimal preview size. For instance, if you are using a 27 iMac, your resolution is: 2560-x-1440. So what size preview is "the best?". You would think that since the long edge of the screen resolution is 2560, that a preview with 2560 resolution (if there were such a thing) would be the best. This might lead a user to think that they only have the option of using 1:1 previews to get the optimal experience on a 27 iMac. This isn't the case though. The limiting side in this case is 1440, your image will never be "taller" than 1440, no matter if it a portrait or a landscape. My camera (7d) has a 2:3 resolution...so the widest image from my 7d that I can possibly see on the screen is 2160. 1440 / 2 * 3 = 2160. When you take into account that the Lightroom application takes up some of the pixels on the top and bottom of the screen, you can then see that the 2048 standard preview size is sufficient. You shouldn't have to do 1:1 previews for LR to be optimal. 2. But there is more to the story here. It might be that 2048 preview size is less than optimal, because it is actually too big. It takes some time to load the preview from the disk, and if you are working with a big preview, it's going to take longer to grab from the disk. Modern computers are pretty good at up-sampling images. On the other hand, it is going to a little time for the processor to resize the images, because the LR interface isn't "fixed" in size, and the user can change things around. So it is really random what size the preview is actually going to be in the end. I did some tests looking at various size/compression previews, and I couldn't visually tell a difference (on the 27in iMac) between 2048 and 1680. It seemed to me that the 2048 was SLOWER rendering though, which is contrary to what you would think, since that would be the "right" size for the monitor. So in the end I just wasn't sure which was best, because I couldn't tell which previews (on the disk) I was actually looking at. One solution to some of these problems would be to have a SQUARE shaped reviewing interface that is fixed according to the monitor size. This would only be for the Filmstrip view (or some new mode), not the develop where you absolutely need to see the whole screen, and you are rendering 1:1 anyway. So the "portal" that images show up in would have the same length and width, and this would be the exact size of the standard size preview. So the image would not have to be resized after it is grabbed from the disk. This has the added perceptual benefit of not being "jumpy" as the user moves though images with different aspect ratios. Finally, ideally the compression ratio would be automatically sensibly set based on user testing, so there isn't a situation where the previews are "heavier" than they should be. This would make things super-fast. r ps the preview pyramid concept is pretty cool. It would be neat to see that info in the UI somehow. ... View more

My guess was that preview dimension was "long side"...so when you pick 1440, you are picking either 1440 wide or 1440 high, depending on whichever was longer for the image in question. I think the reason that they don't pick monitor size is that the preview size are catalog based settings...so there might be a case where a user wants to create a catalog on their desktop, but they want to actually use the catalog on their laptop. In that particular case, the user would want to pick a preview size that is smaller than the optimal size for their desktop...or vice versa...the user might want to create a catalog on their laptop that they are later going to use on their desktop; in this case the user would want to create larger previews that they could use later. Perhaps there is also a use case if the user has two monitors. So I think that is Adobe's logic behind letting the user pick the preview size in the first place. In theory it makes sense for more flexible usage of Lightroom. If this is the case though, they really should add this to the list of fixes/changes, and find a way for LR to pick the best default settings, and only allow the user to pick different settings when they acutally need to do the 1% use case. For 99% of the cases, the user just wants to have the most optimal settings for the computer they are actually creating the catalog on. Since Lightroom has the ability (internally) to "know" what the resolution of the monitor is, and also it "knows" how much of the sceen space that the Lightroom application actually takes up (with tabs, panels, etc)...the Lightroom application is in a better position than the user to "know" what settings the user actually needs to make optimal rendering happen. I surely have no idea what that setting should be. One thing that might be really helpful to all of us that are trying to diagnose the problem is some actual data in the application that tells us what size preview we are actually looking at. If I build a catalog with previews at 1440, then later decide to rebuild previews at a larger size....but the previews don't complete for whatever reason, my catalog will have some of both. There is no way for me to actually tell when I'm looking at an image what size/compression the preview is. This would be very helpful feedback for the user that wants to tweak these settings and optimize their catalog. Is this what "optimize catalog" is supposed to do? ... View more

thank you, I didn't know about that one...I'll give that a try ... View more

Why not just use bridge? That's a good question, one that I've gone back and forth on. The main advantage to LR over Bridge are the database features...hoping that they will work well always keeps me coming back. 1. Lightroom allows you to view images across folders, while Bridge doesn't. Theoretically you could work with your whole collection of images instead of just one folder. 2. Lightroom gives better control over filtering than Bridge, although you can do a lot by just sorting in Bridge. 3. The importing/exporting in LR is improving and become more useful. Like the export to FTP plugin (which isn't included with the software!). This definitely saves a step, once you go through the trouble of setting it up. If there were some way to do #1 in Bridge, I wouldn't really have any particular reason to use Lightroom at all. #2 and #3 would be a big bonus, but I could live without it, just to get the job done. Bridge also has "Browse Mode" which kicks LR to the curb in terms of review speed. I disagree that LR's ACR controls are better laid out...I like the tabs of ACR better than the spinning triangles and panels, because the tools are always in the same place. Once you click a tab you don't have to scroll up and down to hunt for them. I also like ACR's cropping tool better; after years of using LR, LR's cropping still doesn't feel right because it works differently than every other cropping tool out there, and you can't spin a photo "all the way around" if that makes sense. I don't like that I have to click and unclick the lock icon to set the aspect ratio...it just never seems to be set "right" when I go to use it...always an extra step there. Finally, I like that you can multi-select in ACR and edit a group of images at once. So if you took a succession of images that were a stop to dark, you can just select all of them, then boost the exposure easily with one click, DONE. With LR, you have to first select your group of images in the filmstrip, make your changes, do CTL-shift-S (i think! for synchronize) then fill out a dialog box, then click yes, then wait. It's quicker and easier in the ACR plugin. ... View more

The only features I really use are the import/export, library and develop. I send my work out for printing, and I would never use some kind of export from lightroom to present to a client on the web. On some level I think even the develop module is excessive, because those features overlap photoshop and the ACR plugin, which I think is easier to use and more straightforward for doing multiple image selections. I would just use photoshop ACR plugin if it were easy to select a group of images in LR and open them directly in camera raw, as you can do in bridge. That said, I do actually use the develop module, and if it worked well I wouldn't have a huge issue with those features being in lightroom, as long as they didn't come at the expense of the primary goal of being an image management system. I don't think there has been enough of a priority on raw speed (and sensibility...like a pause button on processes) for image management functions. If you are a portrait photographer, maybe this isn't a big issue...maybe you only deal with 100 carefully made images from a two hour shoot. If you shoot events, or performances, you might take 2000 or 3000 images in a shoot. If you work with multiple photographers, the images quickly add up. Before you can even think about editing photos, you need to be able to view, DELETE, tag. There can't be any lag at all between images or this is agonizing. So in sum: everything except Library is excessive (or icing on the cake, depending on how you look at it) > Goodlux7, what would you consider unnecessary features in LR3? Any of the adjustement tools? Currently the "Web" and "Diashow" module are unnecessary for me. But they might be essential for others. I don't mind that they are there. I rather prefer to have some extra features I currently don't need than the other way round > ... View more

Strongly disagree that LR needs yet more ways for the user to tweak it. Take for instance, "Standard size preview" Adobe gives the user not 2 or 3 options here, but 12 different options for preview size/quality, but no explanation of what might be better, or why. There are no sensible defaults, no quantitative facts. A user has to go in and rebuild his catalog using each setting...then somehow guess which setting was actually the best, based on their "sense" of what is going on, and possibly their stopwatch. I just tried doing this, rebuilding catalogs using 3 of the 12 different settings. It was hard for me to distinguish which was actually "the best", other than a vague sense something was slower than the previous time I had looked at it. I think Adobe needs to work on cutting out the many unnecessary features out and make a "fast/usable mode" or a "lightroom lite". Once they get things working a production speed, then maybe go back and add new ways to tweak it. I agree that it is really difficult to balance all the tasks LR has to do. And since the user or task-specific requirements are very different I don't think it will be possible to optimize everything automatically. So I would suggest to add some user control here. The only obvious performance related options I could identify in LR3 were "cache size" and preview type and size. As a bioinformatician I know that you have to find a balance between flexibility and simplicity. But LR is already very complex and requires a lot of learning to make full use of it. And performance is really crucial. So the benefit of a few more options will easily outweigh the tradeoff in complexity. At least if the performance tweaks can be reset easily to defaults. Even Windows allows the user to adjust the priority of running tasks manually. A similar system with six (or maybe seven for more symmetry) relative priority levels would look promising for me. Besides the ability to adjust a specific job that is currently running also the default priorities should be adjustable. And since it looks to me as if not only CPU is balanced but also I/O a similiar system here might also be beneficial. > ... View more

Adobe should set up something like this. http://uservoice.com/ It takes 5 minutes. It would be interesting to see which user issues get the most votes. For instance, Adobe has done a lot of work to make sure LR will run on a laptop. At first blush, that makes a lot of sense, because there are people out in the field that want to do their work on location and get stuff out to clients immediately. But when you consider that LR doesn't even work correctly on a hefty desktop with lots of resources, it kind of makes the effort to get it working on a laptop highly questionable. Do you really want to waste your time out in the field tweaking LR? People really need image database / image management tool when they have a lot of images. I wouldn't think most people store lots of images on their laptop. Do they really need an image database on their laptop? Personally I would never use LR on my macbook, because it's just too slow. If I needed to edit a photo "in the field" I would just use photoshop, then later import again on my desktop. I'm sure there are people who feel just the opposite. So bringing this full circle, the "voting up" feature is really helpful for everyone to see what actual users actually want. Maybe most people don't want "laptop friendly" lightroom...or maybe they do. Maybe most people don't want click and drag sliders to change the exposure...or maybe they do. It would be great if everyone could see that, and it was quantified. Otherwise, it begs the question: who is Adobe building LR for anyway? The product team? Or the photographers? ... View more

This is the issue I'm having now...I get the jaggies, the the "loading..." freeze, then LR hangs on that particular image for an random amount of time. If I click another image in the filmstrip, the image does not change. This could last 2 seconds or 30 seconds....or longer. It seems like lightroom is first "looking" at the catalog preview, getting a rough image, then "looking" for data from the DNG file. Maybe the worker processes are hanging because data isn't returned fast enough over the firewire connection? The way to replicate this would be to set up LR with a relatively fast machine (a fairly new iMac). Then put a bunch of DNG files on a USB or Firewire drive. Import them into a catalog, keeping the files in their location, and you should have the same problem when scrolling through the catalog. Too many times the rendering just gets "stuck" and doesn't complete. Hmm. That sounds like worker pool saturation. I've seen stalls and (long) hitches (especially on low end hardware), but I haven't been able to reproduce an out and out "stuck" condition that never resolves. Resolving such a bug would certainly help, though I expect the time it takes from adjustment to final rendering may still be longer than one might hope. ... View more

Unfortunately ESata is not an option...the fastest port on the iMac is fw800. The only option is to have the cache on the local drive, or the firewire drive, and my guess is neither would be faster than the internal drive. This is an apple defect...I don't know why they don't include an Esata port in this day and age. In my mind's eye I see Steve Jobs having a hissy fit about esata. If I could backtrack and do it over, I would definitely go for a PC with Windows 7 and Esata external drives for photo doing editing. When you say "clear the cache" do you mean: "Purge Cache" button in the settings? Or actually go in and delete the .lrdata file? I just tried "Purge Cache" and when I'm only looking at 100 photos (I've selected one folder) it does seem faster....not so many jaggies, and the loading icon overlay doesn't come up as often...it seems to only come up after I've moved over a bunch of images, then stop on a particular image. Again though this is much quicker. Not sure why it suddenly seems to be working better, but thank you! ... View more

ok, so having the catalog on the firewire drive was the issue here. Thanks Jay and Mikkasa for pointing me in the right direction there. I think this is the blog post that recommended storing on an external drive: http://thelightroomlab.com/2009/05/how-to-get-your-lightroom-catalog-onto-an-external-hard-drive/ Bad advice! I've moved the catalogs to the main local drive, and since I am using file vault on os x, I don't put them in my user directory...I store them in an unencrypted folder off of the root drive. My source files are still on the firewire drive. I've also moved the ACR Cache to an unencrypted folder from the default location. This is much quicker that what I was just experiencing with the catalog on the firewire drive. However...I'm back to square one; when I move though the previews, I still get the half-second pause when the image first comes up...first jaggy jpeg image, then smoother image. Sometimes the loading... icon comes on for a split second, sometimes longer, and sometimes it just hangs and I can't switch images...I'm going to say 10 seconds. I thought the whole point of having previews is so that this wouldn't happen. Is there any fix for this? Thanks again! ... View more

Well storing the images on the internal drive is not an option. There are too many, so this wouldn't make sense for me. But ill try moving the previews over to the local drive and see how it goes. I moved them off in the first place because of performace issues (file vault), at the advice of a blog post I read. It seemed to make sense at the time. This is a firewire 800 interface, purchased within the past year. So modern, up to date equipment. ... View more

I store my image files (dng) on a firewire raid drive, which has two 2TB drives mounted as a single 4TB drive. I also store the previews on that drive. I haven't noticed any performance issues moving data on or off this drive, or from other applications (say, photoshop) accessing this drive. I use an online backup (crashplan), but I have been careful to turn off the client and background server while generating previews. Other than that, there is no other software running concurrently (like an antivirus or applications) that I know of. If I do use other software...say firefox...it is noticeably lagged while generating lightroom previews. I've increased the cache size to 200GB in the lightroom settings. I assume it stores them on the local drive. The files themselves are images made with a Canon 20d, 30d, or 7d...most are probably with the 30d. They are stored in folders by year, then shoot under one common "photos" root drive. I generated medium sized previews, using the maximum resolution size available (i don't know what it is off the top of my head). I'm not sure if there is other information that would be helpful. ... View more

The adobe people aren't here because they all left for vacation immediately after spewing out LR 3. "Mission accomplished!" "See ya! Wouldn't want to be ya!" "Pass me my margarita!" So I deleted my previews, as suggested by someone on the thread, and rebuilt all my previews (about 100k images). It took over a week running nightly and some days, to rebuild the catalog. This is on a band new quad core iMac. The results? It still doesn't work! I'm getting the 2 minute "loading...." now for every image. I really need to get some work out to clients. I'm weeks behind due to this "upgrade". I'm definitely returning my copy of LR 3 and reinstalling LR 2 and rebuilding my LR2 catalogs. 2.7 wasn't really this bad, was it? What a mess. As for the answer to "Why is Lightroom so slow?" "Because you keep buying broken software and not returning it." ... View more