P: LR4 is slow to move photos from one folder to another compared to LR3

[lrl117]

I am using LR4 on a Mac with 8 gb ram, I7 processor and OSX.
I have been using LR since LR1. LR4 is terribly slow. Trying to move photos from one folder to another takes about 20-30 seconds per folder on file sizes of about 6 to 12 mb. Is Adobe aware of this? If they are, I'll be patient. If not, it will force me to consider changing programs.

[lrl117]

Interesting. Prior to this, I had been advised by Adobe that a work around was to close my Collection pane, restart Lightroom and then work with the pane closed. That did speed up the transfer of files greatly. They said that I have a lot of smart collections and the updating of these collections were causing the slowdown. The new Lightroom release 4.1 seems to be working ok with transferring files from folder to folder. I think that it is working with the Collection pane open but I will check it again this evening.

I assume that Adobe is reading these posts, (although they remain very silent) and perhaps it will give them an additional clue as to what is happening.

Adobe has not handled the communication well during this problem. I do like the program.

[Benjamin Warde]

The specific issue that we fixed is that when you had smart collections that had folder-related criteria (Lance had a lot of these in his catalog), the smart collection query was re-running every single time a photo was added to or removed from a folder. This is what was making things so slow in Lance's case. This was not new to Lightroom 4, the same thing happened in Lightroom 3, so I'm not sure why Lance would not have seen the same problem in Lightroom 3 (unless Lance didn't create the folder-based smart collections until Lightroom 4).

There is no known issue with preview incompatibility between Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 4. There were a lot of other variables changed at the same time in Steve's steps (relaunches, catalog optimizations, etc.), so it's hard to say if rebuilding the previews is really what made the difference. Seems unlikely, but anything is always possible. :-)

-Ben

[lrl117]

Ben, I had virtually the same amount of Smart Collections in Lightroom 3 and did not have that slowness problem when moving files from folder to folder.

[Benjamin Warde]

When I test with the catalog you provided, I get the same slowness in both LR3 and LR4. Life is full of mysteries. :-)

-Ben

[lrl117]

Ben, hope this isn't a duplicate reply. Looks like the original got lost when I signed in. Adobe may not like iPads.

LR 4.1, same catalog as I sent to you but with about 8,000 more pictures and a few more smart collections. Moved 22 pictures from one folder to another on my iMac.

Collection panel open: 60 seconds

Collection panel closed: 60 seconds

Quit LR, reopened LR. Collection panel closed: 2.4 seconds.

Adobe has more work to do to fix this. But it is much better than previous version.

[Andrzej007]

It works for me.
moving 54 photos - 40 seconds.
moving using your workaround - 10 seconds.

LR 4.1, Core 2 Duo.

[Andrzej007]

Moving 212 photos - 34 seconds.