13.3.1 Still painfully slow

[hchandless]

13.2 was a rocketship on my computer 64gb RAM 2 2tb M.2 drives. 13.3 and 13.3.1 are almost unusable.  Switching from one photo to another in a shoot of about 1000 photos (Catalog has about 150k) takes 20 seconds or more. It was instant in 13.2. Exporting 100 JPGS take 5 times longer at least. Using things like the crop tool in the develop module is so laggy that it is almost impossible to use. It was like liquid glass in 13.2. 

Please, fix. Not doing a whole summer like this. Don't make me switch editors.

[jabraham]

It takes at least 5 minutes to add 100 photos to the target collection in my library. Maybe longer. I give up after 5 minutes. 

[jo sch]

The solution in a similar thread was to disable the antivirus software. If possible, only on the Lightroom catalog and the cache and preview folders.
It is unclear to me why it should have been so much better with 13.2. But it's worth a try.

P.S.: I would never have called any version a rocketship 🙂 12 cores, 96 GB, 2 x m2-drives (pci4), rtx 4060

[photoshop64]

I'm on Mac. I don't have antivirus software.  It's incredibly slow.

[Mark Power]

13.3 and 13.3.1 are just agony. No changes from using 13.2, same everything.... no cloud synching. It's gone so slow - in every respect - that it's unusable. Looked up some suggestions for speeding it up and some "expert" said turn off writing metadata automatically. I did and wished I hadn't because when you turn it back on (as it is easy to forget to do it manually) it re-writes the metadata for the whole database (120,000+ photos), which makes it even more frustrating!!! Not sure I can live with it much longer. Adobe has to say something about this and fix it..... quickly!!

[Ganji12]

Only solution i find is to work on lrc 12..

It's stupid but since the lrc 13 everything lag.

[fijnheid]

Please let me know what information you need to look into this issue. It has not been resolved for me, and continues to make it almost unusable for selecting/sorting through my photos.

The only new performance issues I have are in the Library module, especially with adding photos to target collection (using the "B" shortcut). Other things that are also a bit slow are flagging photos as pick, though that is a delay of seconds, rather than a delay of half a minute for adding photos to target collection.

It seems the filmstrip view just doesn't update in a timely fashion and/or is just held up by some invisible process.

I have top-end hardware and the catalog and lightroom both on separate m.2 SSD's. I did not have these issues with Lightroom version v13.2. My catalog is very large, over 400k images, but I get these issues when working in folders of 1000 images.

I've had Lightroom open "in the background" for a very long time, long enough to have it finish any invisible background processes. (If that takes longer than multiple days, I'd love to see a progress bar.)

[Jao vdL]

>especially with adding photos to target collection (using the "B" shortcut).

Tried to reproduce this on my mac book pro M1 Max 32GB and doing B is instantaneous. This is on a 200k images catalog that I have about 10k images synced to the cloud in. There might be something to the theory that the new syncing architecture is to blame although it finally fixed all my syncing frustrations (it basically was completly nonfunctional before).

[Lynsey22388863f7tz]

Exactly the same here. There is some sort of process constantly running in the background and I can't identify what it is. I'm stuck staring at my screen for half an hour before an image saves back in from PS. I think I have to change editing software - I have such a backlog of work to get through I can't just sit here looking at a frozen screen. Worst LR update to date. 

[Hingane]

Same here, when syncin everything lags and copy settings takes minutes, and i cant see how many photos lightroom is syncin nothing to tell if the symc is even done

[photoshop64]

Lightroom Classic: Try Unsyncing all synced collections and then delete all images from the "All Synced Photographs" under the Catalog tab.  Don't delete anything in the Cloud Website or you'll permanently lose it.  Quit LR Classic and reopen. Then loook at the Cloud icon upper right and see if it has a checked green dot that says 'Synced."

No try editing in the Develop Module. Mine is fast and works fine now. I think the problem lies in the cloud Sync mechanism.  

[Mark Power]

I'm not using cloud synching at all and my 13.3+ is running slower than a tortoise (I've checked and it's definitely OFF). As someone else has mentioned, there is a background process going on that seems to be accessing the drives where the photos in the catalog are stored. Whether this is affecting things, I don't know. I've dropped back to 13.2 (only needed me to re-import one set of photos) and things are slightly better, but there still appears to be a loss of speed as far as local masking and cropping, plus one or two other things, are concerned. I've got the feeling the rush to get 13+ out has completely trumped the usual testing program. I might try dropping back to pre-13 until all this is sorted.

[riccimar]

My background Lightroom activity went to zero after about a day with LR opened. Now it works fine even if i am not that happy with export time, but they are ok. 

[alexskunz]

I believe both the slowness and the re-writing of XMP metadata could also be related to the "New preview level organization" that was mentioned among "Other feature enhancements and changes", here: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/whats-new/2024-3.html

If I'm understanding it correctly, this is a background process that needs to run, and depending on the number of photos and existing preview cache, it might take quite a long time to update it all.

I deleted my entire preview cache with the 13.3 release. It meant slower operation when accessing individual folders at first (obviously), but otherwise 13.3 has been running nicely here. (Mac Studio, M2 Max, Sonoma) Might be worth a shot? As a precaution, just renaming the previews.lrdata would probably be better. 🙂

[Ian Lyons]

The previews should automatically update to the new format when the catalog is updated. However, some users have reported that this doesn't occur and the application creates a new near empty Previews.lrdata folder. There are a few threads in which this has been found to be the case, and I know from personal experience that the automatic previews update can fail.

It's also worth noting that preview building doesn't need to run in the background. If the user wants to, they can run the Build Standard-sized Previews or Build 1:1 previews anytime they choose. 

[Mark Power]

Further to the message above, a slightly more "forensic" look into this has now definitely revealed that the "background process" is actually what I presume is part of the updating of the catalog. It is re-writing ALL of the XMP files in the catalog. It's NOWHERE NEAR having done them all. My original files are all on 8GB external hard drives (USB 3), so I guess not ideal circumstances, but even so!!!  I estimate from what I can see has been done up to now, there is another solid week of this to go.... for each catalog!

[Mark Power]

Oh.... forgot to mention, the "auto update XMP files" option is OFF. This is all triggered by the updating of the catalog when you first open it in version 13.3. I have no control over whether or not this happens. 

[alexskunz]

Did you try removing/renaming your previews.lrcat already like I suggested? Without the existing previews, there's nothing that LRC will have to update. It will only render new previews when you access a folder/collection of photos (when the thumbs are visible in the grid).

[Mark Power]

Hi Alex. I did and it made absolutely no difference because the issue - in my opinion - isn't anything to do with the previews/lrdata folders. I am 100% certain that LR is simply re-writing ALL of the XMP files in the catalog (presumably with slightly a different format than previously). You can see it in the various folders on disk, the XMP files are gradually being updated (and tagged with the date they were updated). It seems to be randomly doing it - folder by folder. It is not doing it in the order they were added to the catalog, but it is doing it. This has definitely been initiated by the upgrade of the catalog.... it's nothing to do with me or my preference settings in LR itself, they are set for manual updating in an attempt to maximise performance. Unfortunately, it appears that this isn't happening as a background task either, since looking at the Task Manager appears to show that the activity is just an up-front task within LR just running as an app.... which I think explains why various random tasks such as cropping and masking are being affected so badly and so randomly, LR isn't prioritising these over the XMP updating; it's trying to run them side-by-side. LR seems to be hogging all of the processing power of the PC, but to be fair I'm not running much else.

[alexskunz]

It's odd, I agree. I have "Automatically write changes to XMP" set to ON and did not experience this, but I did delete my previews.lrdata with the 13.3 update, so perhaps mine's been updating all of them too, just not all at once (I haven't looked, but I would have noticed a performance hit like this for sure, with ~47k photos in my catalog).

The fact that LRC does update the XMP whenever something new is added to the Develop module (such as: Generative Remove, Lens Blur, Content-Aware Remove, Point Color, Color Grading vs Split Toning, etc. etc.) without also bumping the Process Version is known, and has been cause for much grief (if you use Publish Collections). I can only guess that it is a side effect of updating the preview structure.

FWIW, I have "discard 1:1 previews" set to just 7 days, and my previews.lrdata is currenly ~200gb (using a 5k monitor).

[Mark Power]

That background "process" that is clearly going on has now been apparent for over TWO FULL DAYS and shows no sign of stopping. My catalog has about 130k photos in it. My PC is by no means slow.... it's way above the minimum spec for LR to work.

Lightroom Classic version: 13.3.1 [ 202405311538-6d7c0308 ]

License: Creative Cloud

Language setting: en

Operating system: Windows 10 - Business Edition

Version: 10.0.19045

Application architecture: x64

System architecture: x64

Logical processor count: 8

Processor speed: 3.4GHz

SqLite Version: 3.36.0

CPU Utilisation: 25.0%

Power Source: Plugged In, 255% 

Built-in memory: 16297.8 MB

Dedicated GPU memory used by Lightroom: 1573.7MB / 4004.0MB (39%)

Real memory available to Lightroom: 16297.8 MB

Real memory used by Lightroom: 4046.7 MB (24.8%)

Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 6256.1 MB

GDI objects count: 916

USER objects count: 3324

Process handles count: 8014

Memory cache size: 197.9MB

Internal Camera Raw version: 16.3.1 [ 1889 ]

Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 5

Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2

Camera Raw virtual memory: 1222MB / 8148MB (15%)

Camera Raw real memory: 1368MB / 16297MB (8%)

Cache1: 

Final1- RAM:248.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, 5D4-108987.CR2

Preview2- RAM:22.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, 5D4-108989.CR2

Preview3- RAM:16.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, 5D4-108991.CR2

Preview4- RAM:16.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, 5D4-108985.CR2

Final5- RAM:644.0MB, VRAM:698.0MB, 5D4-108987.psd

Preview6- RAM:16.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, 5D4-108990.CR2

Preview7- RAM:16.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, 5D4-108986.CR2

Final8- RAM:248.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, 5D4-108988.CR2

NT- RAM:1226.0MB, VRAM:698.0MB, Combined:1924.0MB

Cache2: 

m:197.9MB, n:1219.8MB

U-main: 118.0MB

System DPI setting: 96 DPI

Desktop composition enabled: Yes

Standard Preview Size: 1440 pixels

Displays: 1) 1920x1080

Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: Yes, External touch: No, External pen: Yes, Keyboard: No

Graphics Processor Info: 

DirectX: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (32.0.15.5599)

Init State: GPU for Image Processing supported by default

User Preference: GPU for Export enabled

Application folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Lightroom Classic

Library Path: D:\Lightroom Catalogs\Marks Photos\Marks Photos-v13-3.lrcat

Settings Folder: C:\Users\Scan\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom

Installed Plugins: 

1) Export to Photomatix Pro

2) Flickr

3) FocalPoint 2.1

4) HDR Efex Pro 2

5) Luminar 4

6) Luminar Neo

7) Nikon Tether Plugin

8) ON1 Effects Free 10

9) Perfect B&&W 1

10) Perfect Effects 4

11) Perfect Photo Suite 7

12) Perfect Portrait 2

13) Perfect Resize 7.5

14) ProShow Producer

15) ProShow Web

I have another two catalogs (customer photos) that total about another 300k, which implies I'm still in for quite a lot of pain!

Why can't there be some form of information displayed during the "process", indicating exactly what is going on and how far along the line to completion you are. I have no idea what's happening or how long it will take.... the only information I have in the obvious accessing of drives, which tells me nothing. It's there when I have LR open, it's not when I don't! There appears to be no pattern to the bottlenecks and stoppages that happen whilst trying to use the software. It just appears to be slowing at random points and I just seem to be letting things run in the hope that the background activity will eventually stop and things will be OK. However, if it's taking this long with 130k photos, how long with the other catalogs....? It's still chugging as I write this.

[jo sch]

Assuming that the background process is the problem, you could try changing its priority in Windows.
Either higher and then perhaps let it run overnight, or lower if you want to work at the same time.

- Go to the Processes tab in the task manager to adjust process priorities.
- Right-click on the process you want to adjust and select "Set Priority."

Good luck

Don't forget to backup

[Mark Power]

Thanks, Jo. However, it HAS been running overnight.... twice! I'll follow up on the advice you give re. prioritising processes.... but this seems to suggest that nowadays being able to use LR involves a Masters Degree in computer science - which it shouldn't. I'm a professional photographer.... not an IBM contractor. It should be a case of just click on the LR icon, import, process the photos using the [not inconsiderable] skill that I have and then exporting the resulting final image to my client. If I wanted to occasionally wanted to spend a couple of weeks completely re-jigging my system architecture I'd get a job as a contractor, the money's way better!!  🙂

[yamato7]

How about creating a new user and using that?

[TOKU]

I came to this forum to write a post and I see that this topic has already been discussed more than once... What's the deal with this program, I can't work, the computer slows down every now and then, everything freezes, I'm frustrated with working with such software and I don't know what to do... Has anything helped you? I have a slightly better computer than you, but I'm about to throw it out the window, I can't work. Unless you have 5x more time and more nerve resources.

[sharpeyes]

I too have a very slow somewhat unresponsive latest version of LRC. I have a Mac Studio, M1 chip, 30gb memory and have found it very fast until now. Sometimes 5-20secs to change to next image. It has become unworkable. I have made a few changes I've seen mentioned here but no difference. It doesn't any longer do what it use to do prior to the latest LRC upgrade and reminds me of yesteryear computers when 5-20secs may have been considered fast.