Grid View scrolling is very slow

Question

Lightroom classic 12.0.1 on an Mac Studio 12.6.1 with pictures on external RAID drive, catalogs on boot SSD.

Grid view scrolling is very slow. When I move to a new page the previews are all grey with no previews showing. Click on an image, go to develop, doesn't show that a preview exists. A few seconds later the previews are built for that page, but go to the next one and we start all over.

I removed the 30 day preview deletion option. Selected all photos and rebuilt smart previews resulted in a ~170 GB file. It was previously only a few gigabytes. No change. Optimised catalogue. Removed previews.lrdata keeping smartpreviews.lrdata. No change. Previews.lrdata is ~58 GB.

Scrolling through all of my ~170k photos to get the previews built isn't a viable option.

How do I fix this?

johnrellis · Answer

To test my understanding: You scroll to a page in Grid view and it takes a few seconds for the thumbnails to appear. You scroll to the next page and you have to wait a few more seconds for those thumbnails to appear. If you then scroll back to the previous page, does it happen quickly, or does it take several more seconds for its thumbnails to appear again?

Assuming that scrolling back happens near-instantaneously, this is normal behavior when there are no existing previews for the photos you're scrolling to. It sounds like you deleted "<catalog> Previews.lrdata", so now LR is incrementally rebuilding the previews as you scroll to each new page of thumbnails.

You can force LR to build all previews by going to All Photographs and doing the menu command Library > Previews > Build Standard-Sized Previews. It will build on the order of 2 - 5 raw previews per second, so it could take 9 - 24 hours to build previews for 170K raws.

Some notes on what you wrote:

"I removed the 30 day preview deletion option."

That option only affects 1:1 (100%) previews, not standard-sized previews.

"rebuilt smart previews resulted in a ~170 GB file."

Smart previews aren't used in Library Grid view, only in Develop.

"Previews.lrdata is ~58 GB."

In my catalogs, "<catalog> Previews.lrdata" consumes about 3 - 5 MB per photo on average. So when your "<catalog> Previews.lrdata" is fully built for 170K photos, it might be roughly in the range of 600 - 700 GB.

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