Performance shifting from image to image - M2 Pro 16GB Ram

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
May 8, 2024
1 reply
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Hey everyone,

I'm sort of at my wits end here. I am culling my images in Lightroom classic but the performance is baffling in its slowness and the momentum killing of my culling and rating process is being flatlined. I shoot on a Sony A7IV and forwhatever reason, scrolling between images using the cursor often results in a delay of several seconds before the new image is displayed. This was not always with lesser systems that I've owned. And while there is a slight difference (maybe?) between JPEG and RAW files, it is not very noticeable and something leads me to believe I have something set for the worst possible performance haha. Please note I checked and it appears as though Hardware GPU acceleration is all on and functioning just fine.

Thanks for any suggestions in advance.

macOS

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Correct answer KyleAndrew

So I just did some digging and kind of feel a bit like a fool. I'm sharing what I found out here for anyone that may see this in the future. I had been going through and culling images in the Develop module and apparently that loads a type of preview that is much much slower and Adobe itself recomends that you always cull and such in the Library workspace/module. So now I know!

D Fosse

Community Expert

Try to monitor memory usage.

I've noticed that browsing in Develop tends to use quite a bit of VRAM. It won't max out, but it tends to remain high - 75-80 % or so.

That's normally not a problem, but an integrated GPU doesn't have its own VRAM, it uses shared system memory. And then 16 GB isn't a lot. With an integrated GPU you should double the amount you would normally need.

KyleAndrewAuthorCorrect answer

Inspiring

So I just did some digging and kind of feel a bit like a fool. I'm sharing what I found out here for anyone that may see this in the future. I had been going through and culling images in the Develop module and apparently that loads a type of preview that is much much slower and Adobe itself recomends that you always cull and such in the Library workspace/module. So now I know!

Conrad_C

Community Expert

It’s slightly more complicated than that, but generally, yes, Library is faster and the right place for culling.

In the Library module, display speed depends on how fast it can load a preview.

If a current preview exists for an image, it can just throw that up on the screen, so that’s fast.
If no preview exists, or a preview exists but it doesn’t match the current Develop edits, then you wait a moment while it builds a preview.

So in the Library module, the culling is as fast as possible when images have current previews. So some photographers like to pre-generate previews for all images in a shoot before culling.*

Library module previews are basically Adobe RGB JPEGs, because speed and space savings are priorities.

In the Develop module, it’s different because the priority is, as you edit, to show you the highest possible display quality and resolution. These high requirements for quality make Develop previews larger and somewhat slower. Instead of just throwing up a compressed JPEG preview, Develop makes sure its preview is a full quality, full resolution Lightroom Classic rendering of the raw data using the current Develop edits. Rendering that every time you change images would be slow, so first Develop looks to see if it already made a Develop preview, which it stores in the Camera Raw Cache (so, it isn’t the same kind of preview or storage location as Library previews). If a Develop preview is in the Camera Raw cache and it’s current, it puts that on the screen instead of wasting time re-rendering. You can control the location and size of that cache in Lightroom Classic preferences / Performance tab.

* If you don’t want to wait to generate previews for a large shoot before culling, what I do is, in the Import dialog box, set Build Previews to Embedded & Sidecar. When that’s enabled, Lightroom Classic won’t automatically build its own previews after import. Instead, it will instantly display the preview already embedded by the camera. However, there are two disadvantages: Some cameras embed previews of limited dimensions and quality, so sometimes you have to generate full resolution previews anyway to check things like focus and sharpness. Also, any preview embedded by the camera will not match the result of the Lightroom Classic Develop engine, so the first visual edit made to any image will require generating a Lightroom Classic preview for it.

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