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crsouser
Known Participant
April 24, 2015
Question

Lightroom 6 / CC2015 - Facial Recognition Terribly Slow, not using all of CPU or GPU, still keeps going when paused.

  • April 24, 2015
  • 34 replies
  • 38815 views

This is actually a couple of issue but wondering if others are experiencing it and worked through it.

I am using a Dual Xeon CPU 3.2 ghz Mac Pro, Catalog on SSD, Images files on Mirrored Pair, Dedicated GPU (max I can install in my version of Mac Pro) and hardware acceleration enabled in Lightroom.

I watched the Lightroom 6 Facial Recognition tutorial which leaves out a lot of the bulk editing and says basically let it loose on your whole catalog.. NOT recommended.

I started out with a couple small portrait galleries that identified a couple hundred total people to seed facial recognition so it didn't suggest everyone is the first person I confirmed (which it will do otherwise). I have also optimized my catalog multiple times.

I have encountered the following serious performance issues and bugs with Facial Recognition.:

  • Lightroom Facial Recognition goes to a ridiculous crawl after about 2000 images to be confirmed. (i.e. 2000-2300 in a couple hours, 800-1200 in the next 12 hours)
  • Lightroom becomes largely unresponsive after having a fair number of images to be confirmed, even after pausing Address and Facial Recognition. So even selecting 4 rows of images can take 5 minutes with several long pauses.
  • Once I select and click confirm it takes up to 2 minutes to update the "to be confirmed" list again.
  • When I click on an individual at the top of the page, pause facial recognition and address lookup it still continues to "Look for similar faces" [BUG!!!!!!!!] even though all I want to do is just confirm some individuals more quickly in bulk with the images already identified.. not continue to look for more as a work around for the painfully slow responsiveness of the module.

The odd part is that with all of the performance issues Lightroom will not use more than 20-30% of my two Xeon CPUs, barely touches my GPU (<10% CPU, 30% memory), my and no more than 35% of my memory. Computer Temps are also barely above startup temperatures and 15-25 degrees cooler than when I run other applications which will consume my entire CPU and memory if I let it. I have explored Lightroom's settings but seen nothing further I can configure to speed it all up.  I have also attempted the operation on images on the SSD, my drobo (known to be slow), an independent fast disk I have, and a pair of raided disks and have the same issues.

I will also note that all of my other applications seem to continue to operate just fine.. the slowness seems to be contained to the Lightroom application itself.

Lightroom version: 6.0 [1014445]

Operating system: Mac OS 10 Version: 10.10 [3]

Application architecture: x64

Logical processor count: 8

Processor speed: 3.2 GHz

Built-in memory: 18,432.0 MB

Real memory available to Lightroom: 18,432.0 MB

Real memory used by Lightroom: 5,537.5 MB (30.0%)

Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 32,240.6 MB

Memory cache size: 4,342.0 MB

Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 8

Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2

Displays: 1) 2048x1152

Graphics Processor Info:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 OpenGL Engine

Check OpenGL support: Passed

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Version: 3.3 NVIDIA-10.0.31 310.90.10.05b12

Renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 OpenGL Engine

LanguageVersion: 3.30

Application folder: /Applications/Adobe Lightroom

Library Path: /Users/DryClean/Documents/Lightroom_Catalog/MyCat_LR6.lrcat

Settings Folder: /Users/DryClean/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom

Anyone have any suggestions?

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    34 replies

    Herinto
    Herinto
    Participating Frequently
    June 13, 2020

    After trying everything, jncludibg a brand new Mac Pro with all the trimmings to optimize for Lightroom, I now upload my photos on Google and search for them there. It is a thousand times better at facial recognition, plus you can search for things like "Irene at the beach", "Tokyo" or "brown puppies" and find them in minutes. 

    Adobe should consider doing a j.v. with Google in facial recognition and search. 

    J
    juliusm61723319
    Participant
    March 24, 2017

    IMO, this capability is not ready for use at all. It completely ignores people that are viewed from the side (profile), or wearing sunglasses. Its accuracy is completely inadequate and it continues to do very rough mistakes (mixing a guy with beard with a young girl) after getting thousands of images to learn on. In short - it is useless. It is heavily behind the industry state of the art. It can't be compared with long existing face recognition capabilities of Google or Facebook. It is a shame that so professional software company releases such poorly designed feature.

    H
    hungchi
    Known Participant
    July 22, 2016

    I'm also seeing major performance issues in the people view. removing or confirming a face region which results in a not responding state.


    Watching the system performance I see 18% CPU use and very high disk uses.

    Seems like the performance issues are mostly related to a lack if optimization or lack of GPGPU processing resulting in higher CPU use and disk related performance issues. (I'm planning on doing some additional SSD drive tests)

    I have followed the recent performance recommendation to drastically increase the camera raw cache I've set my cache to 100GB

    Here are my system specs

    Lightroom version: CC 2015.6 [ 1078672 ]

    License: Creative Cloud

    Operating system: Windows 10

    Version: 10.0

    Application architecture: x64

    System architecture: x64

    Logical processor count: 8

    Processor speed: 3.3 GHz

    Built-in memory: 32717.7 MB

    Real memory available to Lightroom: 32717.7 MB

    Real memory used by Lightroom: 2913.0 MB (8.9%)

    Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 2994.3 MB

    Memory cache size: 6380.9 MB

    Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 8

    Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2

    System DPI setting: 96 DPI

    Desktop composition enabled: Yes

    Displays: 1) 1920x1200, 2) 1920x1200, 3) 1600x1200

    Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: No, External touch: No, External pen: No, Keyboard: No

    Graphics Processor Info:

    GeForce GTX 1070/PCIe/SSE2

    Check OpenGL support: Passed

    Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

    Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 368.81

    Renderer: GeForce GTX 1070/PCIe/SSE2

    LanguageVersion: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

    Application folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Lightroom (SSD drive)

    Library Path: Z:\Pictures\Lightroom\LR4-CATALOG\LR4-CATALOG-2-2.lrcat (7200RPM HDD)

    Settings Folder: C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom (SSD drive)

    Images are also on Two other internal HDD Drives (4 drives in the system)

    H
    hungchi
    Known Participant
    July 25, 2016

    Debating what an appropriate preview cache size is. Since I'm hearing a lot that larger is better I'm following that logic.
    I'm raising my preview cache size from 100Gb to 250Gb. Here is how I determined my new starting point.

    Standard preview size = 1920px


    [ (preview size in pixels) * (preview size in pixels) / ( (bytes to killobytes) / (killobytes to megabytes) / (megabytes to Gigabytes) ) ] * (images in catalog)

    [(1920*1920) / (3*1024) ] * 62300 = 213.89 Gb (rounding up to 250Gb)

    I'm hoping that will help

    marcin65906372
    marcin65906372
    Participant
    March 14, 2016

    +1 - I have exactly the same problem. PC with a very good spec (i7, 16GB RAM, SSD). Performance when tagging people (answering to the proposition: yes /no) is extremely slow. CPU is utilized at 10% maybe. Disk usage is at 2%. Not sure what's wrong, but seems like some crappy issue in Lightroom app. Looking forward for resolution - Picasa was way more better & responsive in this area.

    Pat Wibbeler
    Adobe Employee
    Pat Wibbeler
    Adobe Employee
    May 15, 2016

    I have a 65k photo catalog and found some of the same performance issues described here with performing operations on large sets of photos. Confirming takes many minutes to re-search for "similar" photos in the People Viewer and large selections make the browser less than responsive.

    I found that the experience was MUCH better if I constrained my working set to 1000 photos or fewer by choosing a subset of my files in the Library module before entering the "People" view. When I increased that to 5000 photos, it was almost manageable as long as I didn't try to "confirm" too many photos at once. I'm just going to work 1000 photos at a time. I am sure that this number will vary depending on system performance. Here is mine for reference (a roughly 5 year old, but highly spec'd PC at the time):

    • Intel Core i7-2600k - 3.4GHz
    • 16 GB Ram
    • Catalog on SSD, photos on regular spinning disk

    I am an Adobe employee, but I don't work on Lightroom so please don't consider this an "official" response.

      M
      Mixelmagic
      Participant
      December 3, 2015

      In my case face recognition became bearably fast when I disabled GPU acceleration. I realised mine (512Mb 6770M) was way below the recommended spec for that feature.

      With GPU acceleration enabled every single click, or face assigned caused a really long wait. Now there are short waits but nowhere near as inexplicably long, so that's something. :/

      This really needs fixing. Photos, Aperture, and Google Photos can all do this stuff with a responsive GUI. This should be a premium implementation.

      T
      thwald
      Participant
      October 17, 2015

      First off, I agree with everyone here so far in that the kind of performance we see in this product is appalling. This is a professional product from a company that should be familiar with its users. This is not a computer problem that is too hard to fix, as others (Picasa for example) have solved many years ago.

      I have about 60,000 photos in  my library. It took my Macbook Pro (Core i7, 2.3 Ghz) a full day and a half to find and index all the faces. It started out pretty fast but once the number of named faces reached about 1000, it slowed to a crawl. at about 5000 faces, it was no longer useable.

      My take on why the UI slows down is because it is just the UI that is slow, not the worker threads (if there are any). Lightroom seems to update the suggested name of every single photo in your library at every click, including (somehow) those not displayed on the screen. Therein lies the  problem and also a workaround.

      A Workaround:

      I discovered the following by accident when I worked with faces form the "Previous Import" smart collection.

      In your folders view, select only a few folders to limit the number of displayed photos to several thousand. Now I am not sure how reasonable this is for everyone who uses Lightroom face recognition (eg, some shoots may include more than several thousand photos), but...

      THIS DOES WORK for me. The UI becomes lightening fast when renaming photos. I would be interested in knowing if this helps anyone else.

      Good luck!

      A
      Anonymous
      November 13, 2015

      @thwald your workaround fixed the issue for me..thanks! 

      What I did is had Lightroom crunch through my entire library detecting faces which took 20 hours.

      Now I just drill down to the year folder I want to work on and the UI is lightning fast applying tags.

      If I work on the top level folder for faces the UI crawls.

      Working from the year level is what I want to do anyway.  It's a reasonable workaround for me!

      M
      mj33641480
      Participant
      October 14, 2015

      Just want to add a +1 to LR being excruciatingly slow. I came from Picasa because I had heard alot of great things about LR, and just looking through LR it seems functionally more mature than Picasa, but good god, I am not going to wait 5 to 10 seconds between clicks just for some extra functionality.

      I will check back in next release to see how things are progressing.

      StuartBerman
      StuartBerman
      Participant
      August 10, 2015

      I agree with everyone here. This feature is a great idea but no way is it ready for launch. The biggest issue is that even when you get through all the wrong identifications you find it missed half the faces. Even ones that are so plainly obvious are missed.

      Anyone upgrading from LR5 will be horribly disappointed.

      I really hope they will release a better version as this one is a shambles.

      M
      MM-Webconsulting
      Known Participant
      October 7, 2015

      There was an update on CC 2015.2 yesterday and the problem is still not solved!

      ADOBE, why?

      H
      hhelmbold
      Known Participant
      August 10, 2015

      Just adding my voice to this post as I am experiencing the same issue that it cannot be switched off or paused. Lightroom carries on! This is ridiculous!

      I love the facial recognition idea and I work with individual catalogues per shoot, so I can decide which catalogue to index and which not, but Lightroom forces you to have it on every single catalogue.

      M
      MM-Webconsulting
      Known Participant
      July 21, 2015

      ADOBY, WE NEED A SOLUTION!!! NOW!

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