Backup and optimization are soooo long

Forum|Forum|8 days ago
April 18, 2026
4 replies
83 views

For several versions, optimizing and saving the catalog has taken a lot of time (for 85,000 photos, it now takes more than 30 minutes, whereas it took 5 minutes about 2 years ago) and the situation is getting worse.
I haven't changed hardware, disk, save location, ...
Do anyone see the same problem?
I was told about a possible connection with the use of AI for denoising, is this a clue?

sébastienm12072343Author

Participant

Thank you for your answers. I’ll try to see if all my denoised photos really must be saved...

Ian Lyons

Community Expert

You can’t separate the files types with backup. The LrC backup does not include your files. As @JohanElzenga mentioned, only the catalog (lrcat) and the lrcat.data (includes the Denoise data) packages are backed up.

sébastienm12072343Author

Participant

Yes, I understand, but I think that I can delete some denoised photos I decided to keep but I don’t use any more, in order to delete files AND datas in catalog (which will become lighter).

AxelMatt

Community Expert

Agree with @JohanElzenga and @dj_paige .I'm see the same behavior. Since I don't use AI Denoise very often, it doesn't take 30 minutes. Data backup, however, takes several minutes even for a relatively small catalog.

My System: Intel i7-8700K - 64GB RAM - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 - Windows 11 Pro 25H2 -- LR-Classic 15 - Photoshop 27 - Nik Collection 8 - PureRAW 6 - Topaz Photo AI

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Yes, backups can take a long time if you do a lot of denoising, because that makes the .lrcat-data file grow enormously. What takes the most time by far is zipping the files, so what I do these days is not let Lightroom make the backup each time, but use a separate utility to do this. Of course these backups won’t be zipped, but the zipping does not save that much space anyway. Because Lightroom verifies and optimizes the catalog, I do still use Lightroom for backups from time to time, but only once a week or so.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

dj_paige

Legend

Yes, this is normal now because Adobe began storing Denoise information and other AI information in the associated LRCAT-DATA file, which is part of the backup made by LrC.

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/whats-new-in-lightroom-2025-06/

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded