Skip to main content
M
mattn74915582
Participant
January 2, 2019
Answered

open multiple ACR instances?

  • January 2, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 1842 views

I use ACR to process thousands of airphotos at a time, which works well enough except for speed.  The issue is that when I close ACR, even without hitting Save it still saves my adjustments and this takes *forever*, which wouldn't bother me so much if I could continue to work in Bridge or ACR with other photos.  The speed has nothing to do with my hard drive speed etc, as far as I can tell, same issue on an raid SDD as on a 5400 rpm spinning disk and same issue for a decade.  What I'd like to be able to do is continue to work with other photos while ACR is saving in the background.  I know I can open another Bridge window by hitting Ctrl-N, but this does not solve the problem, once I open ACR both Bridge windows are locked out so I cannot open another ACR or work in the other Bridge window.  Is there a way to put this file handling stuff into the background, or open a second ACR from Bridge while the other is saving, or in any way work around this issue (short of having multiple computers work off the same shared drive)?

Thanks,
Matt

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer gary_sc

    Thanks Gary.  You seem very knowledgeable about these things, do you know if there is a good reason for all this?  That is, I can't be the only person frustrated by having to wait forever while ACR closes itself -- is there some code reason that we can't get two or more instances opening at the same time, like almost every other piece of software that exists?  The ability to do this would solve many limitations it seems.  Or is there a reason why ACR is not it's own stand-alone software?  I've been a heavy user of it for almost 10 years, and these enforced pauses in my workflow have given me plenty of time to wonder why this is. I guess the real question I have is given how long its been like this and how many users are adversely affected, will any amount of complaining or suggestions now will cause Adobe to fix this?  Thanks, Matt


    Hi Matt,

    Actually it's not only ACR that has this limitation, I do not think I've seen any software application that can do what you want ACR to do. I've never seen any application that can start a process, pause it while you do something else in the same application, and then go back to the original application. At best you can "stack" a series of operations so that when you're ready for a break you can initiate the process to go forward and then pull away from the computer and join life for a few minutes! ;>)

    (However, ACR cannot "stack" operations although, as mentioned, Lightroom can.)

    Here's another example but with Acrobat: Several years ago while I was in the process of retiring, I had a bunch of papers in my filing cabinets that I didn't want to lose but there was no way I could take the cabinets. So I scanned them. A friend lent me his FujiScan so I could do bulk scanning and it worked great, no fantastic really. However, the quality of the OCR was not very good and the size of the documents was outrageous. Fortunately at the end of the day I would take Acrobat, point it at a folder of documents and tell it to OCR them. This would tie up the computer for a fairly long time so I left for home at the end of the day to come back and find everything done. It worked great. While Acrobat was doing this, the computer was essentially unusable: if you were reading your email or looking in a browser, after every page was processed, Acrobat would pop up to the front of the screen and say (effectively) "OK, I'm done with that page..."

    Talk about annoying!

    Anyhow, I think your best option is to plan out when ACR is going to be processing something and use these interruptions as an excuse to push the chair back and walk around or something else "healthy."

    I would be grateful if you could select any one of the answers here and mark that one as Correct Answer.

    3 replies

    M
    mattn74915582Author
    Participant
    January 5, 2019

    Thanks Gary, Chuck.  I suppose there is some good reason for it, but it is unfortunate to me that ACR is not a standalone application.  It's all I use.  I process 10,000 photos a day with it often.  It does a fine job of the photo processing, but it is frustrating that once I finish a batch of a few thousand photos I have to wait 20 minutes before I can load another batch because ACR is saving those settings in the foreground rather than in the background.  Actually hitting Save on those does sort of work in the background, but it bogs performance down so much that it's basically unusable, so I do all of the saving overnight.  So I have it instead on several computers and I move from one to another during those enforced breaks, which seems a bit silly, and also creates some minor issues because each monitor is slightly different despite calibration.  It just seems like I shouldn't have to apply a 1980s solution in 2019 to software that's been in development for 30 years.  I don't know the inner mechanics of course, but if each Bridge window could launch it's own ACR, that worked independently, that would solve the issue.  As would simply making file save truly a background process that doesn't interfere with continued photo processing.  But it is what it is, and I'm at least glad to know I haven't been missing some secret setting.

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 5, 2019

    10,000 photos a day??? My gosh, how many cameras do you go through at that rate?

    Have you tried opening up multiple images at a time in ACR and making them all active so that as you adjust one, you're adjusting them all?

    Another thought: let's say you have 1000 images to process. Is it faster to do them in batches of 100 (10 times) than all 1000 in one fell swoop?

    Just out of curiosity, what kind of photography do you do?

    Chuck Uebele
    Community Expert
    Chuck UebeleCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 3, 2019

    Yea, Gary pretty much answered what can be done with ACR. He mentioned on ACR for PS and one for Bridge. I used to correct all my images using the ACR through Bridge, then that would leave PS free to run a script that I wrote to formats the images and put headers on them, while I corrected more images in ACR. I haven't tried running both versions of ACR at the same time. You would have to select one batch through Bridge, then one through PS or you OS. Not ideal, if it even works, but the only way I can think of getting at least 2 instances of ACR at the same time.

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 2, 2019

    Hi Matt,

    Well here's the deal: you are either going to tie up Bridge or you will tie up Photoshop. It sounds like you're prefer to NOT tie up Bridge and this can be done.

    Go into Bridge's Preferences and in the General tab there's an option marked out below. If you uncheck that than ACP will open and occupy Photoshop's brain instead of Bridge's brain. This means that you can load up a whole bunch of operations in ACR and still have access to Bridge.

    HOWEVER: this only works on double-clicking an image. If you right-click an image (or click on the ACR icon in the Tools region) this will cause ACR to act like it's taken over Bridge's brain again. This furthermore means that if you are opening up JPGs or TIF images for the first time (and thereby right-clicking), it will not work. If you have already made ACR adjustments with ACR and are re-opening the same document, than you can double-click with impunity while leaving Bridge available.

    Please let us know if this was what you are looking for.

    M
    mattn74915582Author
    Participant
    January 3, 2019

    Thanks Gary, that's helpful.  Unfortunately I wasn't clear enough in my question, what I want to close ACR so that I can select a new folder of images to work on using Bridge without waiting 10-20 minutes for ACR to update settings from the last batch.  That is, somehow put the file saving part in the background, or if not then open a second ACR window to ignore the one saving settings.  So I only use Bridge to select photos for ACR, so when ACR is stuck saving having a usable Bridge window do me any good, because its another ACR window that I need.  Thanks, Matt

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 3, 2019

    Ah, nope, can't do.

    I think the only other option you might have is to use Lightroom as it can "cache" operations to some degree so that you can (for example) start one HDR operations, then another, than an HDR-Pano operations, etc. Unfortunately this can only go so far to a point that it starts backing up and the total time for a collection of cached operations starts to take longer than to do a few at a time and wait for things to catch up, then do more.

    A similar often requested wish was to select a number of HDR/Pano images and then tell LR to process them while you go off to dinner. Still waiting for that one as well.

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
    Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices