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P: Constantly "saving xmp for xx photos" slowing down my Lightroom Classic!

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
September 5, 2024
23 replies
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Did a job yesterday and got home to edit the photos..
Immediately after importing the images (.CR2 Raw files from Canon 5DS) Lightroom started struggling to perform ANY action.. even going to the next frame in the film strip took several seconds, with a few short appearances of the spinning beach ball.. Editing was practically impossible - trying to crop an image and move the crop rectangle was taking about 15 seconds to update the frame position..

I looked what 'activity' was happening behind the identity plate at the top left and it was "saving xmp for xx photos" (xx was a number between 25-80 something).. but then if I moved to the next frame, it repeated - "saving xmp for xx photos"...

Everytime I perform ANY action, it's saving XMP to multiple photos - even though I only have one photo selected in the strip. If I switch from library to develop, it again saves XMP to multiple photos - without me changing ANYTHING...

Why is Lightroom constantly writing XMP to multiple photos that haven't changed?? It's hogging my system resources!

Here's a video - the only action I'm performing is pressing the right cursor key to go to the next frame in the folder.. ALL files have already had current metadata saved to them, so there is NOTHING to save XMP for!

Was working in Lightroom Classic 13.5.1 - first job in that, so reverted back to 13.5 but it continued to keep saving XMP info for multiple files.

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daleducatte

Participating Frequently

After watching Junction10photo's video showing excess XMP activity, I realized I was experiencing the same thing -- mainly because I had seen performance deterioration with LrC 13.5 and 13.5.1 that I hadn't seen previously.

I wanted to see if I could reproduce the problem intentionally. Here's what I came up with, and now I can repeat it at will.

I have "Automatically write changes into XMP" turned on. I'm not synching any collections to the cloud.

I have a collection with 25 images in it; the images are only in this one collection.

In the Develop module, I first right-click on one of the images and select "Show in Finder" then filter the Finder list by ".xmp" and sort it by descending Date Modified. This is so I can easily see what happens next.

I select 15 of the 25 images, turn on Auto Sync and make a basic editing change. All the XMPs for the images I just edited get updated, with their Date Modified set to, for example, "Today at 10:55 AM." This is expected, of course; and I used Auto Sync simply to get the same Date Modified on all 15 XMPs.

Without doing anything else in Lightroom, I wait until the computer clock changes to 10:56 AM.

When the clock changes, I switch from Develop to Library. After a few seconds, the 15 XMPs get updated again, with their Date Modified changed to "Today at 10:56 AM" -- even though I didn't make any more changes to them after the Auto-Sync/edit.

I wait another minute (for the clock to change) while in Library view without doing anything, then switch back from Library to Develop. All the same XMPs are updated again, their Date Modified changing to "Today at 10:57 AM."

I keep doing this, and every time I wait a bit and switch between the two modules, the XMPs get updated. This isn't the only time it happens; it was just easier to explain this way with a repeatable test. It will also happen if I stay in Develop and edit images; select different ones; switch between collections; pass the mouse over the filmstrip; or leave Lightroom open, work in another app, then return to Lightroom. These last two are weirdly fascinating.

Here are some other observations on what else may be happening because of these extra XMP updates:

- Memory usage climbs substantially, when the only thing I do is switch between modules. Performance drops, and the memory isn't freed until I restart Lightroom.

- I often get the "Adobe Lightroom is not finished writing metadata changes..." message when exiting -- something I had never seen until I updated to 13.5 then 13.5.1.

- I had been syncing about 500 photos to the cloud until recently, but noticed (by watching Sync Activity in Preferences) that sync kept looping repeatedly through photos it had already synced (and I hadn't edited). I reset preferences and followed the reinstall procedure for Lightroom, but the problem persisted so I stopped synching. Now I wonder if repeated syncs were getting triggered because of the excess XMP updates.

In conclusion: Well, I can't really think of anything, but maybe this testing provides some insights into a number of problems people are reporting since the 13x releases.

johnrellis

Legend

@daleducatte, excellent detective work!

Here's a slightly simpler recipe for reproducing the misbehavior on LR 13.5.1 / Mac OS 14.6.1. I've attached a screen recording with the long pauses edited out:

1. Place 30 raws in a folder.

2. Open Finder on that folder, with View As List, sorting in descending order by Date Modified, searching by Name: .xmp.

3. In LR, set Catalog Settings > Metadata > Automatically Write Changes Into XMP.

4. Import the raws from the folder with option Add.

5. Select all the photos and go to Develop.

6. Change Exposure.

7. Do Sync with Check All.

8. Wait until the clock ticks over to the next minute and go to Library. Observe all the .xmp sidecars get modified.

9. Wait until the clock ticks over to the next minute and go to Develop. Observe all the .xmp sidecards get modified.

10. Repeat ad nauseum.

xmp-sync-bug.zip

johnrellis

Legend

And here's a recipe showing that simply hovering the mouse over a photo in the filmstrip causes its .xmp sidecar to be modified (see the attached recording):

1. Do steps 1-7 of the previous recipe I posted.

2. Still in Develop, hover the mouse over another photo in the filmstrip. Observe that its .xmp sidecar gets sorted to the top in Finder, indicating it was just modified.

3. Repeat for each of the other photos in the filmstrip, repeatedly. Observe the .xmp sidecars get modified over and over.

xmp-filmstrip-hover-bug.zip