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January 24, 2026
Answered

Lightroom Calssic 15.1.1 Freezes/Hangs on Startup

Asus V16 laptop

32Gb RAM

Intel Core 7

Win 11 26200.7623

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050

 

Lightroom classic starts up and gets to loading preferences then hangs.

 

So far I have:

Updated to latest version

Uninstalled and reinstalled

Reinstalled drivers for GPU

Started app with defult preferences (shift, alt)

Disabled all plugins

 

No change to behaviour. Was working fine the night before, now no luck.

Seems like there is an error message that pops behind the loading modal but unable to see what it says.

Vid of behaviour is attached.

samuel_1303Correct answer
January 24, 2026

Solved.

Moved cataloge out of the (Windows) Pictures folder and restarted Lightroom. Fired up perfectly.

2 replies

samuel_1303AuthorCorrect answer
January 24, 2026

Solved.

Moved cataloge out of the (Windows) Pictures folder and restarted Lightroom. Fired up perfectly.

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johnrellis
Legend
January 25, 2026

"Moved cataloge out of the (Windows) Pictures folder"

 

One possible cause of this behavior: Are you syncing the Pictures folder with a cloud service, e.g. Onedrive, Google Drive, etc?  There are many reports of syncing LR catalogs causing problems.

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