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André27525322pu30
Participant
May 24, 2025
Answered

Lightroom Classic very slow on M3 Pro Macbook Pro

  • May 24, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 800 views

Hi everyone, I have a M3 Pro Macbook Pro, 18GB RAM

 

I'm a professional photographer using LrC as my main editing software and at some point, after updating from version 13.3, it became very slow: Ai noise reduction was painfully slow and export times took very long. I rolled back to version 13.3 and it went back to normal, with the laptop processing Ai NR at about 5 seconds/photo, for reference.

 

Well today, after being away from the laptop for a week, the same thing happened. LrC is painfully slow, for reference Ai NR is taking 30secs for a single photo and export times are very long. I'm very stressed as my LrC is an important tool in my workflow.

 

What I've done to try to fix the issue (without success):

- Restarted the machine;

- Updated LrC to the latest available version (14.3.1);

- Moved catalog from external hard drive to the laptop's ssd.

- Deleted previews and optimized catalog;

- Turned graphics processing off and changed Camera Raw cache from 5 to 10GB;

- The laptop feels smooth everywhere else, isn't set to low power mode or anything so I isolated the problem to LrC.

 

I'm running MacOS Sequoia 15.0

Any ideas on what can be causing this? There are times where I need to batch process big galleries (300+ photos) and this is slowing down my workflow...

Thank you very much

Correct answer dj_paige

@André27525322pu30 

One user reports thermal throttling in his M4 Mac causing slow exports. Forcing the fan to come on seems to have made the problem a lot better.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/why-does-lightroom-not-use-the-performance-cores-m4max-during-export/td-p/15349358

2 replies

dj_paige
dj_paigeCorrect answer
Legend
June 10, 2025

@André27525322pu30 

One user reports thermal throttling in his M4 Mac causing slow exports. Forcing the fan to come on seems to have made the problem a lot better.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/why-does-lightroom-not-use-the-performance-cores-m4max-during-export/td-p/15349358

A
André27525322pu30Author
Participant
May 24, 2025

Update: I rolled back to version 13.3 and the Ai NR improved from 30 seconds/photo to 14 seconds per photo now, so it seems like my issues are coming from the newer versions.

johnrellis
johnrellis
Legend
May 25, 2025

"I'm running MacOS Sequoia 15.0"

 

LR's AI commands are very sensitive to problems and bugs in graphics drivers. On Mac, the only way to get the latest drivers is to update Mac OS.  (You're on a version that's 7 months old.) This may or may not be the cause of your issue, but on average, out-of-date drivers have been the cause of many, many problems reported here.

 

Also, please please do the LR menu command Help > System Info and copy/paste the entire contents here so we can see exactly which versions of hardware and software LR thinks you're running and important LR options that are set.

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