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Claudio_Marques4259
Participant
March 22, 2026
Question

Lightroom Extremely Slow – Only App Affected

  • March 22, 2026
  • 5 replies
  • 208 views

Hi Community,

I’m experiencing severe performance issues with Lightroom. The app is extremely slow, barely usable, while all other Adobe Suite apps run smoothly on my system.

I’ve tried restarting the app, change settings, edit on my SSD but the issue persists. I haven’t made any recent changes to my setup that would explain this. I use Windows 11, release 15.2.1 and Camera Raw 18.2.2

Does anyone have suggestions on how to resolve this?

Thanks in advance for your help!

    5 replies

    Participating Frequently
    April 20, 2026

    Another update (15.3) which is total disaster! The whole necessity of updating of denoise, remove and mask again and again is really annoying!!! The speed of Lightroom is now absolutly tragic!!! I have MacMini M4 Pro, 48GB RAM.

    Rafael Aviles
    Legend
    April 20, 2026

    I think I found a workaround to the problem. Things get much better (almost normal speed, stable) if I do not have the Library module pointed to “All Photographs” (left column, under Catalog) and instead pointed to to the folder where I have only recent (this year’s) pictures. My catalog has over 75,000 files and I can confirm that when I point there, Lightroom slows way down. I don’t know if it is trying to create Previews in the background for all the photos, or doing some kind of indexing, or what. I do not have Face Recognition or Culling on (ever) but who knows, maybe Lightroom does something in the background to get ready for it. This could explain the abnormally high CPU and memory usage even when I’m not doing anything. I do not pretend to know what is actually going on behind the curtain, but by sticking to a small subset of the catalog, I avoid the slowdown/lagging problems that I had been experiencing since version 15 came out. YMMV.

     

     

    Rafael Aviles
    Legend
    March 23, 2026

    Check out these threads:

     

    Ian Lyons
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 23, 2026

    In addition to the info requested by ​@nikunj.m it would be helpful if you provided a detailed description of which module and what activities are ‘extremely slow’.

     

     

    Claudio_Marques4259
    Participant
    March 23, 2026

    Hi, thanks for your concern. To be clear, it’s not just one feature. Nearly everything in the module is extremely slow—menu navigation, switching photos, applying presets, using masks—basically the entire workflow is laggy. As i mention before, just to open “Preferences” took me about 15 seconds to show up the pop up.

    nikunj.m
    Legend
    March 23, 2026

    Hi, thanks for reaching out, and we’re sorry about the trouble!

    Please go to the Help menu in Lightroom Classic, then System Info, and copy the text. You can share the info with us by either pasting it as a reply here or in a text file and sharing the file with us. 

    How big is the catalog that you’re working on? As a test, you can try to create a new catalog in Lightroom Classic, import a handful of images in it and check if it makes a difference in performance. 

     

    Thanks, 

    Nikunj 

    Claudio_Marques4259
    Participant
    March 23, 2026

    Hi, thanks for replying. The catalog is relative small and i did create several new catalogs, every one with the same slow workflow. Even open the menu Edtit → Preferences took me about 15 seconds to show up.
    Here’s the copied text:

    “Lightroom Classic version: 15.2.1 [ 202603161217-0bf813d9 ]
    License: Creative Cloud
    Language setting: en
    Operating system: Windows 11 - Business Edition
    Version: 11.0.26200
    Application architecture: x64
    System architecture: x64
    Logical processor count: 8
    Processor speed: 3,6GHz
    SqLite Version: 3.36.0
    Adobe GSDK Version: 1.4.0.212

    CPU Utilisation: 4,0%
    Power Source: Plugged In
    Built-in memory: 32702,4 MB
    Dedicated GPU memory used by Lightroom: 2590,8MB / 8170,9MB (31%)
    Real memory available to Lightroom: 32702,4 MB
    Real memory used by Lightroom: 2074,3 MB (6,3%)
    Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 5156,7 MB
    GDI objects count: 823
    USER objects count: 2739
    Process handles count: 3269
    Memory cache size: 1032,2MB
    Internal Camera Raw version: 18.2.2 [ 2512 ]
    Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 5
    Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2
    Camera Raw virtual memory: 552MB / 16351MB (3%)
    Camera Raw real memory: 637MB / 32702MB (1%)

    Cache1: 
    Final1- RAM:254,0MB, VRAM:791,0MB, DSC01468.ARW
    Final2- RAM:152,0MB, VRAM:592,0MB, teste aurora-4_80RHlf.jpg
    NT- RAM:406,0MB, VRAM:1383,0MB, Combined:1789,0MB

    Cache2: 
    m:1032,2MB, n:245,9MB

    U-main: 154,0MB

    System DPI setting: 144 DPI (high DPI mode)
    Desktop composition enabled: Yes
    Standard Preview Size: 3840 pixels
    Displays: 1) 3840x2160
    Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: No, External touch: No, External pen: No, Keyboard: No

    Graphics Processor Info: 
    DirectX: Radeon RX 580 Series (31.0.21924.61)
    Init State: GPU for Export supported by default
    User Preference: Auto
    Enable HDR in Library: OFF
    GPU for Preview Generation: On (S5_7)

    Application folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Lightroom Classic
    Library Path: C:\Users\Itsari\Pictures\Global\Global - Évora\Global - Évora.lrcat
    Settings Folder: C:\Users\Itsari\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom

    Installed Plugins: 
    1) AdobeStock
    2) Flickr

    Config.lua flags: 

    Adapter #1: Vendor : 1002
        Device : 67df
        Subsystem : 34181462
        Revision : e7
        Video Memory : 8170
    Adapter #2: Vendor : 1414
        Device : 8c
        Subsystem : 0
        Revision : 0
        Video Memory : 0
    AudioDeviceIOBlockSize: 1024
    AudioDeviceName: System Default - Altifalantes (Realtek High Definition Audio)
    AudioDeviceNumberOfChannels: 2
    AudioDeviceSampleRate: 48000
    Build: LR5x34
    Direct2DEnabled: false
    GL_ACCUM_ALPHA_BITS: 8
    GL_ACCUM_BLUE_BITS: 8
    GL_ACCUM_GREEN_BITS: 8
    GL_ACCUM_RED_BITS: 8
    GL_ALPHA_BITS: 8
    GL_BLUE_BITS: 8
    GL_DEPTH_BITS: 32
    GL_GREEN_BITS: 8
    GL_MAX_3D_TEXTURE_SIZE: 2048
    GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE: 16384
    GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS: 8
    GL_MAX_VIEWPORT_DIMS: 16384,16384
    GL_RED_BITS: 8
    GL_RENDERER: Radeon RX 580 Series
    GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION: 4.60
    GL_STENCIL_BITS: 8
    GL_VENDOR: ATI Technologies Inc.
    GL_VERSION: 4.6.0 Compatibility Profile Context 26.1.1.251211
    GPUDeviceEnabled: false
    OGLEnabled: true
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    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 23, 2026

    Hi, ​@Claudio_Marques4259, the first thing that comes to mind is how full is your system disk? Lightroom (and you are not saying which one you are using, Lightroom Desktop or Lightroom Classic, please let us know). Either way, Lightroom can be a very process intensive application and if you do not have much ram on your computer, and there is disk swapping* taking place, that can slow things down. This might not affect other applications if they are not processor intensive applications.

    If you have plenty of hard drive space available and lots of ram, let us know so we can offer some other ideas.

    *Disk Swapping: if you have a small amount of ram, your computer will push some of the stuff that it’s doing over to your hard drive. This takes time. If you do not have much space on your hard drive, there isn’t much space to swap ram with, so it has to do this more often. If your hard drive is losing free space, you can move your images to an external drive to give it more more to work with.

    If you feel you need to do this, please check back with me to get some suggestions. Also, please let us know if you’re on a Mac or PC. Thank you.

    Claudio_Marques4259
    Participant
    March 23, 2026

    Hi, thanks for replying. I have 928GB free on the SSD and 2,7TB on the hardisk. 32GB ram and and Radeon RX 580 8gb dedidaded graphic card. I work on a PC and edit 4k videos on PR with no perfomance issues. PS and Ai run smooth. Only LR has this issue.