Skip to main content
J
Jacob_Hudon
Participant
August 18, 2025
Question

Severe Memory Usage (when exporting) in Lightroom Classic 14.5 on the latest macOS

  • August 18, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 376 views

Hello everyone

I’m experiencing a serious performance issue in Lightroom Classic 14.5 on my MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro and 24 GB of unified memory running macOS 15.6. Even with a small number of photos (around 40 RAW files), Lightroom consumes an extremely high amount of memory, triggering macOS memory pressure warnings (yellow to red) and causing significant lag.

 

I have already tried the following troubleshooting steps without success:

 

  • Optimizing the catalog

  • Clearing the Camera Raw cache

  • Reducing preview sizes

  • Exporting smaller batches

  • Disabling GPU acceleration for testing

 

 

Despite this, Lightroom continues to use well over the physical RAM (reports show up to 78 GB memory footprint) during exports and heavy edits. The application becomes almost unresponsive during these operations.

 

This seems to be a memory management issue or a memory leak in Lightroom Classic on macOS, as even a small number of images triggers massive RAM usage.

 

I’m looking for guidance on how to resolve this or if there are any fixes planned in upcoming updates. Please let me know if you need additional system logs or crash reports for analysis.

 

Thank you for your help.

    1 reply

    Sameer K
    Community Manager
    Sameer KCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    August 18, 2025

    Hey, @Jacob_Hudon. Welcome to the Lightroom Classic Community. I'll need more info to help you figure this out. 

     

    Where are the original images stored, and what is the destination for the export? You've mentioned the images having heavy edits. Does that mean lots of masks, Denoise, and the AI remove tool? Or a combination of these edits with other global edits? 

    Are you using Content Credentials & Watermark at export? Are any of these images also synced from, or syncing to Lightroom?

     

    Try this:

    1—Create a test collection of a few sample images, right-click on the collection, Export as catalog, and include negatives. 

    2—Open the test catalog in Lightroom Classic & try exporting from this new catalog and check how it goes. 

     

    Let me know how it goes. 

    Thanks! 
    Sameer K
    (Type '@' and type my name to mention me when you reply)

      J
      Jacob_HudonAuthor
      Participant
      August 18, 2025

      Hi @Sameer K 

       

      Thank you for your reply. Here’s some more information about my setup and workflow:

       

      • The original images are stored on my Mac’s Desktop. Some of the files are heavy, but I’m not sure why. I had applied Super Resolution to all of them initially, which made them heavier, but I have since removed it.
      • I occasionally use masks and the Denoise tool, but nothing extremely complex.
      • I do not use Content Credentials or Watermarks.
      • None of these images are synced to or from Lightroom Cloud.

       

       

      I have also tried exporting only the images I need using a new catalog, but unfortunately, the problem still persists. Even with small batches, Lightroom uses an excessive amount of memory and becomes very slow or unresponsive.

       

      Please let me know if there’s any other information or logs I can provide to help diagnose this.

       

      Thank you,

      Jacob

      Sameer K
      Community Manager
      Sameer KCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      August 19, 2025

      Thanks for sharing these updates, Jacob_Hudon. 

      Share the log of what you see in the terminal window when Lightroom Launches. 

      1 - Please follow step 2 here to manually reset Lightroom Classic: https://adobe.ly/4mPADyP

      1 - Go to the following location to launch Lightroom via the terminal.
      In Finder > Application Folder > Open Lightroom Classic Folder > Right-click on Lightroom .app > Show Package Contents > Contents > macOS > Lightroom—double-click to open.
      2—Go to File > Open catalog to open the new test catalog. Parallelly, open the activity monitor and start recording your screen as a video. 

      3 - Record your workflow and monitor the RAM usage go up when you export. 

       

      Share the video with me here, or via direct message from my profile. 

      Thanks! 
      Sameer K
      (Type '@' and type my name to mention me when you reply)

      Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
      Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices