Lightroom hangs when importing from SD cards

Ok, I found this in another thread and DID work for me but at great cost, so I'm giving a detailed explanation of what I did so maybe someone figures out what I did wrong and improve the proces.

!!! BEFORE YOU START: Backup your LR database and note your settings and your development presets. !!!

So I heard I needed to Reset my preferences to fix this.

Open preferences > general

Press ALT (option on Mac?)  A hidden button appears to reset all preferences. (F#ck that Adobe!)
Press it. This took some time on my machine. An extra "Shadow" windows opens up

Freezes my PC, eats up over 40GB of RAM(!) and over 63% CPU(!) untill lighroom crashes.

I figured it did not finish properly. Tried again in a different way.

In Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, there’s an easier way of doing it. All you need to do is hold down Alt and Shift (Windows) / Opt and Shift (Mac) while opening Lightroom. You’ll be asked whether to reset the preferences. The timing is crucial—hold them down while clicking/double-clicking on the app/shortcut.

After this Lighroom started quite fast. But the import was still slow/unresponsive. 😞

There is NOTHING wrong with my SD card's speed. Or my reader. Both work fine and fast in other apps or when using Finder/explorer. Tried different readers and different cards. Same slow lockups in most up to date (Nov 2023) Lightroom Classic Windows 10.

So I went above and beyond. Don't do this without a backup like I did!:

Moved  C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\

to C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\

Restarted - found an EMPTY lightroom

And then the import was FAST!!! but I lost all my development settings and database..

Looking in the original folder I see Lightroom has created a new folder.

Put everything back as it was: my presets and database are back, Import is slow again.

Compared the new folder with the old and found the old folder has a lot of "previous versions" in it.

Restored original folder

Removed old folders like: 0  1 2 3 4 5 and 10.X etc.

Import was still slow

It had a lot of empty folders. Removed them

Restart. All my presets still intact.

Import slow as ever.

Cherry picked other folders to delete.

Keyword Sets
Text Style Presets
Text Templates
Smart Collection Templates
Label Sets

Restart. All my presets&DB still intact.

Import slow as ever.

Cherry picked other folders to delete.

Preferences

Lost all my settings and database but import was fast...

Decided to manually restore my presets and database to keep the fast import. This is where I messed up. Didn't have most recent database so I lost ALL edits on a weddingshoot I did a day earlier. Have to do it al over again 😞

But at least imports are fast again...

I HATE IT...  Crying here... But the issue is fixed.

3 March 2022

I have the identical problem as peterm4847186 posted here in 2018!   Has there not been a fix for this in Lr Classic in four years? 

Using Adobe Bridge, the card reads and downloads the files as it should, but this doesn’t enter it into the Lr catalog! 

What am I missing?

There is a known issue when importing via the 'Devices' segment import dialog. Try selecting your SD card from the 'Files' segment as shown below.

Note that the alternative shown does not auto eject.