Is LR faster with Originals in Pictures Folder

Question

Hello,

I just got a new iMac 27"inch with 32 Ram, 3TB hybrid drive... I was expecting a much bigger speed increase with this new $3600. computer but so far not too impressed, my LR is still sluggish to load images, slow to Synchronize folders which I do alot. Now I do have One Master Catalogue for all my Locations PHotos, I am a Scout in LA. Really need to keep all 700,000 images in one master catalogue. I do NOT shoot RAW so increasling the Raw Cache has zero improvement on my speed.

-If I put my Master Folder of 700,000 Original JPGs in the Pictures folder will that help the speed of LR?

-Any other Settings I can tweek to speed up the situation? I have plenty of hard drive room now, and I am aware of the Smart Previews trick but I don't edit pictures that much, I use Lightroom mostly to find stuff, Keyword, and do custom Collections and Exports.

-Will limiting the number of Location Folders in one Catagory, to say 20,000 images or so speed me up? What is the maximum number of JPG images a Lightroom catalogue can handle before getting slower?

Any speed tricks much appreciated!!

dj_paige · Accepted Answer

-If I put my Master Folder of 700,000 Original JPGs in the Pictures folder will that help the speed of LR?

No, not a bit.

-Will limiting the number of Location Folders in one Catagory, to say 20,000 images or so speed me up? What is the maximum number of JPG images a Lightroom catalogue can handle before getting slower?

I don't know what you mean by "catagory"

There is no limit to the number of images you can put in Lightroom. There is no known limit before it slows down.

my LR is still sluggish to load images, slow to Synchronize folders which I do alot.

The workflow that involves synchronizing folders, when you have this many images, may indeed by slow with this many photos. Especially if you have large subfolders that you are synchronizing —for example, the subfolders under your folder Commercial Retail, if they have LOTS of photos, will be very slow to synchronize. My preferred workflow is to import photos directly from the camera, all the new photos on the camera card are imported at that time and assigned appropriate keywords and other metada. There is no need then for synchronizing folders, no need for moving photos from one folder to another, and you would probably obtain a speed benefit doing this.

Could you be more specific about "sluggish to load images", exactly what do you mean?

Some Library Module slowness can be cured by putting the catalog file and the previews on an SSD, but this will probably not affect the speed of synchronizing folders.

ManiacJoe · Answer

Some generic hard drive optimizations for any usage:

If you have multiple drives available, put the catalog and its cache folders on a separate drive from the original images.

Do not put huge numbers of files into a single folder. I remember when anything over 250 files in a folder was going to be a performance problem. These days, depending on your OS, you should be fine up to 4000 or so with a 64-bit OS. The same holds for the number of subfolders in a folder.

Lightroom does not care about the location of your images. All mine are in a folder off the root called "from_camera".

One thing that can get you into trouble is the length of the path to your images. Most operating systems really don't like path names over 250 characters.

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