Lightroom freezes when performing simple tasks (building previews, photo merge, import/export, closing the app)
Since a few weeks, my Lightroom Classic (15.3.1 release on macOS Tahoe 26.5.1) gets stuck or stops responding on simple tasks like:
- Building standard or 1:1 previews (it gets stuck on ‘Building previews: 3 of …’ but never actually creates one preview)
- Photo Merge (HDR, Panorama or HDR-Panorama, here the cursor immediately starts spinning and the merge preview does not even pop up)
- Importing (I can select a source (for example an SD card) but it gets stuck on Checking for duplicates, even when I turn off 'Don't import suspected duplicates’)
- Exporting (in export I can select all the settings and hit Export but the progress bar remains stuck at zero.
I have to use Force Quit to quit Lightroom when it’s not responding.
This happens 9 out of 10 times I open up Lightroom, the occasional 1 time everything works fine and I can go on for hours merging huge panoramas or building previews of 100s of photos without problems. But whenever I close and reopen Lightroom the next time it doesn’t work anymore. I have not been able to find a pattern for when the session does work (see below for all the solutions I already tried).
Also, whenever I open the catalog I immediately see if the ‘session’ is working or not because the last selected photo will show up grey (no preview) when it is not working. If that is the case, closing the app will results in ‘application not responding’. If the preview is visible, everything works just fine (building previews, photo merge, closing the app). This suggests Lightroom is failing very early during catalog/preview initialization, before any of the simple tasks I try to perform later.
I am running the catalog file on the internal SSD (User/Pictures/Lightroom) of my MacBook Pro 14-inch 2023 with Apple M2 Pro Chip, 32GB RAM, 1TB internal SSD (370GB free space), 10-core CPU and 16-core GPU. So performance should not be the issue, as everything has been working smooth before.
My RAW files are on external SSDs (SanDisk Extreme Portable, formatted to APFS).
What I have tried:
- Restarting computer
- Optimizing catalog —> no problem
- Test integrity of catalog —> no problem
- Turning off ‘Use Graphics Processor’ and ‘Use GPU for Preview Generation’
- Turning off ‘Show photo info tooltips’
- Turning off ‘Enable hover preview of presets, history and snapshots in Loupe’
- Disabling all Plug-ins
- Purge Camera Raw Cache
- Increasing Camera Raw Cache size (from 50 to 100 GB)
- Uninstalling and re-installing Lightroom
- Updating computer to latest version (From macOS Tahoe 26.3.1 to 26.5.1)
- Verified that both Adobe Lightroom Classic and Creative Cloud have Full Disk Access
- Deleting [Lightroom catalog] Previews.lrdata file
- Deleting [Lightroom catalog] Helper.lrdata file
- Disconnecting all external SSDs
- Creating a new Lightroom catalog with a few RAW files that are stored on the internal SSD of my Macbook —> this worked once, the first time using the new catalog I was able to build previews and merge panoramas, but second time opening it runs into the same problems. (Also when deleting the preview and helper files of this catalog)
- Reducing standard preview size and preview quality
Some of these solutions seemed to work once or twice but it now has been 3 consecutive days with many tries and not one session working. I cannot figure out which order of steps I have to do to make it work again!
macOS update history:
macOS 15.6.1:
Version: 15.6.1
Source: Apple
Install Date: 21/08/2025, 06:06
--
macOS 26.0.1:
Version: 26.0.1
Source: Apple
Install Date: 05/10/2025, 11:29
--
macOS 26.1:
Version: 26.1
Source: Apple
Install Date: 14/11/2025, 13:00
--
macOS 26.2:
Version: 26.2
Source: Apple
Install Date: 13/01/2026, 22:10
--
macOS 26.3:
Version: 26.3
Source: Apple
Install Date: 16/02/2026, 23:05
--
macOS 26.3.1:
Version: 26.3.1
Source: Apple
Install Date: 10/03/2026, 20:28
--
macOS 26.5.1:
Version: 26.5.1
Source: Apple
Install Date: 15/06/2026, 19:45
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