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Very large Collections / ~sets slow down Lightroom Classic?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
August 19, 2022
3 replies
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My main Lr machine is still a 2013 MacBook Pro 15" Retina w/ 16GB RAM. My "private" catalog holds 150,000 images and tends to be quite slow, whereas a fresh catalog is still reasonably responsive. I always thought that my 150,000 images catalog was slow because there are so many images.

Then, while discussing config options on a Mac users forum, a contributor comes up with an interesting observation about collections. He says when his collection goes over say 15,000 images, and he has several of those in a collection set, at some point Lr will slow down. Then when he moves some of his collections to a different Collection Set, he's back up to speed. His guess is Adobe reserves a predefined block of memory for a collection set and then when that memory is full, trouble starts.

My question here is have you ever heard of this?

As soon as I get back home I will try to experiment with this myself. I have a bunch of smart collections, all in one collection set, containing my workflow, i.e. which images don't have flags, don't have ratings, no keywords and so on. For statistics I also have smart collections counting finished images, unfinished images etc. These smart collections may contain 50,000 or more images each, and they're all in the same collection set.

Anyone?

Thanks!

macOS

This topic has been closed for replies.

Bob Somrak

Legend

One thing you can do is use the Grid Filter Bar at the top of Grid View to create filters for No Rating and No Keywords to use your examples that can't be created with the bottom filter bar and create a Filter preset. The nice thing about Filters is they are not active and taking computing time all the time when they are not needed and instead of looking at 15000 images in a smart collection you can select a folder or collection and the filter is active.

Even though the Grid Filter Bar is ONLY available in Grid View, the filters created there can be accessed in any module or view by using the Filter Bar above the Filmstrip. The filter created in the Grid Filter Bar can be fairly complex but not as powerful as Smart Collections.

One disadvantage is Filters do not show images in Collapsed Stacks.

M4 Pro Mac Mini. 48GB

Bob Somrak

Legend

Forgot to add, the way to do this is to use the filter columns.

M4 Pro Mac Mini. 48GB

G

GVspikeAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you very much!

dj_paige

Legend

My "private" catalog holds 150,000 images and tends to be quite slow, whereas a fresh catalog is still reasonably responsive. I always thought that my 150,000 images catalog was slow because there are so many images.

Please tell us what actions are slow. Usually, the number of images is irrelevant to the speed of Lightroom Classic.

Please also tell us the version NUMBER of your Lightroom Classic.

G

GVspikeAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you! Currently on LrC 12.0.1. Moving folders on drive can be very slow, especially if the folder moved contains tens of sub folders. All gets greyed out and it may take up to a minute to finish. Also browsing in develop can take time and also masks. Otherwise this version is not bad. On my late 2013 15" rMBP w/ 16GB I get okay performance if and only if I close some other apps. Meanwhile I just picked up an M1 Max MBP 16" 64GB/2TB/24 core GPU (got a 17% discount), which is of course quite responsive.
so maybe it's best I do some testing first and see if there are any issues left.

johnrellis

Legend

Are you concerned about your smart collections or your regular collections? Each kind has (different) performance issues.

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