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narensankar0529
narensankar0529
Participant
July 29, 2022
Question

MacBook Air M1 11.4.1 Classic import or add to catalog takes exceedingly long time

  • July 29, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 245 views

Just updated to 11.4.1 and restarted on my Macbook Air M1 with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD with Catalog and Photos on SSD.

 

Importing new CR3 from Canon R6. First tried to import from separate folder and that was so slow I thought Lightroom had locked up. So restarted computer and moved files in folder directly and tried to "Add" to Catalog. Same issue - import takes a long time even with 1:1 prevews disabled. 

 

Previously on the same machine with the same RAW files it would take less than few minutes to import 100s of images. Now it has been 4 hours and less than 150 images have been imported. and Lightroom sits and uses less than 5% of the CPU.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Ranjisha Sengupta
Ranjisha Sengupta
Legend
July 29, 2022

Hi there,

 

Sorry about the trouble with Lightroom Classic; we're here to help. 

Which version of macOS are you using? Did it start happening after you updated the application to 11.4.1? Where are the images located? Does this happen with other file formats as well? Did you re-install the software? 

 

You can try resetting the Lightroom preferences file using the below procedure and see if that resolves the slow import process.

1) Try the simplest fix first: close all applications, shut down your system, restart the system, reopen Lightroom, and try it again.

 

2) If the problem persists, reset Lightroom's Preferences file. Close Lightroom and rename the Lightroom Preferences file by adding .OLD to the file name as shown below. When Lightroom is restarted, a new Preferences file will be created with the default settings. Try the import process again using these default Preferences settings.

MacintoshHD/Users/[UserName]/Library/ApplicationSupport/Adobe/Lightroom/Preferences/com.adobe.LightroomVERSION.LSSharedFileList.plist.OLD

If the slow import issue isn't fixed, the original Preferences files can be easily restored by deleting and removing the new Preference file.OLD from the original file. Make sure to restart Lightroom so your original Preferences settings can be restored.

 

 

Let us know if it helps.

 

Thanks,

Ranjisha

 

narensankar0529
narensankar0529Author
Participant
July 30, 2022

So I have managed to narrow this down - 

 

My Catalog has multiple folder paths - I keep the last two years worth of photos on my local SSD and the photos that are older than that live on my NAS mounted via smbfs

 

The Catalog is local on my SSD.

 

This was all working fine in the past and did not interfere in any way with imports and creating 1:1 and smart previews. But now I realize that if my NAS is mounted, Lightroom gets stuck for a long time starting the import and then actual import. if I unmount the NAS so that Lightroom thinks the folders are all missing imports are instantaneous. Similarly if the NAS is mounted when I am creating previews of photos on my SSD the preview generation takes forever. I took 8 hours to create 50 1:1 previews. But if I unmount the NAS then the preview generation goes much much faster needing less than a minutes to create 50.

 

So something makes Lightroom think it has to go across the NAS to check or perform some operation on my older photos which then impacts what it is doing to my photos on my SSD.

 

I went back to 11.3.1 and it has the same behavior. But I have updated MacOS to 12.5. So not sure if this behavior change is due to change in Lightroom or MacOS or something changed in my Catalog that makes Lightroom want to do something to my pictures on the NAS which have not changed in more than 2 years. 

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