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Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 4.x

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
March 6, 2012
188 replies
627452 views

Anyone else notice that lightroom 4 is slow? Ligtroom 3 always ran fast on my system but Lightroom 4 seemlingly lags quite a bit.

My system is:

2.10 ghz Intel Core i3 Sandy Bridge

8 GB Ram

640 GB Hard Drive

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

Message title was edited by: Brett N

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Victoria Bampton LR Queen

It's now impossible to see the wood for the trees in this whopping 43-page long thread. Many of the original 4.0-4.2 performance issues have since been resolved, and it's impossible to figure out who is still having problems, and what they can try.

I've started a nice clean thread to continue this discussion for 4.3 and later. http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1117506 Thanks to Bob_Peters for the suggestion. I'm locking this one, otherwise it'll continue to get increasingly unweidly, but please feel free to continue existing discussions on the new thread.

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adventure_photo

Known Participant

Not sure if this helps anyone but I figured something out that has resolved many of my performance issues:

I noticed when I created a new catalog that things seemed fine. So I created a new catalog and imported images from old catalog (150,000). Wow, things seemed snappy. Here's the important thing: I decided to optimize the catalog using File>Optimize. After optimizing, to my dismay, things were back to being sluggish. So, I started to think that something in optimizing the catalog was affecting the catalog. So again, I created a new catalog and re-imported my images again. This time though, I did not and will not optimize the catalog and things are running very smoothly and quickly. Things like adding flags, labels, colors, etc. are instant. Things like advancing images in the filmstrip while in dev. mod. are almost instantaneous (compared to the 5-10 second delay I was experiencing before.

So, basically, I think there is a problem with the optimization algorithms that are somehow causing problems with the catalog. For those of you having problems with major delays and slowdowns, give it a try: create a new catalog and then go to File>Import from another catalog... and re-import the images into new catalog from the old one. Just be sure not to optimize catalog. If doing a backup, the box to optimize catalog is selcted by default. I would recommend unchecking that and not optimize the catalog.

It seemed to solve a lot of problems on my system - hopefully for those experiencing similar problems, this will work for you too.

G

glugglug

Known Participant

Mine corrected itself and optimizing makes no difference, better or worse, All very odd. It looks more and more as if the problem lies in the catalog somewhere, though.

I don't know what the catalog is but if it is a flavour SQL (Lite?), I use that in a bit of programming and it is usually straighforward and rock solid.

jameskachan

Known Participant

Lightroom 4's performance and speed is so poor, the software is virturally unusable.

As a professional photographer, I know my thoughts echo within the pro community that I am in direct connection with, and clearly, those online as well.

It is dreadfully slow, this product should not be on the market.

I believe Adobe fast tracked the release of the software to greedily capitalise on the release of the 5D3 and D800, forcing those owners to switch over from 3 to 4. Rather than providing RAW support for those cameras in LR3.

Lightroom 4 is a pull-your-hairout experience that drains all the joy out of working with photography and is a total nightmare in any professional situation.

I dread when I have to use it to process a job.

Entirely unacceptable Adobe.

—I am also shocked that there still has not been a solid update to address these performance issues. This has gone on for way too long. I litterally used to use LR on a daily basis. Now, I only open it if I absolutly have to.

J

John_Carter_from_Mars

New Participant

well I found the solution I think.... On windows machine go to edit, preferences, camera raw cache settings and make sure it's not anymore the 4G. Mine was set to 100 and as soon as I put it down to 4 everything worked great.. worked for me hope it works for everyone else!

J

John_Carter_from_Mars

New Participant

I want to say it has increased the speed of operation at least 200% amazing! It never ran this quick!! all functions in the develop module are instantaneous.

C

Chris GC

Participating Frequently

Chris GC wrote:
I have just put the cache folder back to the default - and the same situation exists - no cache files for PV 2012 edited files - or new files imported into LR4 with PV2012. But working fine for the PV2010 files.

I can't reproduce this. No matter what I do, I get new cache files with either PV.

Lee Jay wrote:
Chris GC wrote:
I have just put the cache folder back to the default - and the same situation exists - no cache files for PV 2012 edited files - or new files imported into LR4 with PV2012. But working fine for the PV2010 files.
I can't reproduce this. No matter what I do, I get new cache files with either PV.

Lee Jay

Thanks very much for trying. - I thought I was on to something. I have just imported some new photos into lightroom and cannot get any cache files generated for them. However I have explored what happens when old files are updated to PV 2012 - since moving the cache location to the default location and then back to my original position it is now creating cache files for updated photos from PV 2010 to PV 2012 which it was not doing before, it - but not for files imported with PV 2012 assigned. Not sure what's going on.

So I now get cache files for PV2010 and files converted from PV 2010 to PV 21012.

But no cache files for original PV 2012 versions no matter what I do.

J

JustinDustin

New Participant

Somehow I stopped getting email updates on this thread for a few weeks, not that it seems to have mattered as nothing has changed. I'm not a professional photographer, but I have a serious backlog of work that I'd like to get done, and try as I might LR4 is just not making it easy. I've already complained about the slow slider response in the Develop module, and the speed by which Quick Develop changes happen in the Library module. But OH...MY...GOD...if I make a white balance change in quick develop...I...might...as...well...get...a...coffee. Right now I'm applying a tweak to a few hundred photos, and LR4 has basically shut down on me. It's doing its thing, but I can't browse photos, apply ratings, add keywords, or anything else constructive while it's applying the WB changes. WTF Adobe? Is anyone still working on this? It's been nearly a month since 4.1rc2 was released.

R

Robbie2006

Participating Frequently

Don't know if this will help anyone but Lightroom 4 was very slow on my machine which is not the highest spec in the world but I was in preferences / file handling and discovered that my cache memory on my drive was

( drive N / Adobe raw cache ) so I had a look for the cache folder and couldn't find it so I created a cache folder, incresed its size to 20 gig and tried Lightroom 4 again and my PC is running much faster,I can go between grid and develop as quick as I could in Lightroom 3.6, I can now zoom instantly without a two second lag, certain sliders in the develop module are still a little bit jumpy ( I'll leave that one to Adobe ) but overall a huge improvement.

Hope this helps.

R

rbphotog

New Participant

Wow! Some good news, finally. I'm sure going to check that one.

Thank you, Robbie!

C

CodeThought

New Participant

LR 4.1 RC2 is a pig compared to 3.6. I'm seriously thinking about going back to 3.6 until Adobe remembers how to write software again.

Now I'm wondering if I could get CS 6 given the seeming decline in quality of the Lightroom line.

R

Robbie2006

Participating Frequently

Ditto, I don't really need the catalogue, I thought Lightroom would have sorted this out by now, do you think I would get a refund from Adobe for Lightroom 4 and put it towards CS6 and I would get all the extra features as well.

M

Madscape

Participating Frequently

I'm not going to bother with a refund. I'm sure in time a well working version will materialize . The fact remains that this was in no way ready for release. But with that said I do like what I see from what I have used it just needs to be fixed. Untill then I have my 3.6 ..

W

Wanchese West

Participating Frequently

I shoot a lot and process a lot. Wish it was more, but I'm staying busy. At first LR4 was unacceptable. Now with LR4.1 RC, the performance issues are long forgotten. The only thing that reminds me of my previous issues are the pesky notificartions every time someone posts in this thread. If my 4.1Rc is slower than 3.x, I just don't notice anymore. The AMAZING color temp brush alone is worth a 20% hit to speed and performance for me.

Why don't ya'll quit bitching and start working. Perhaps you too will find the enhancements worth the percieved diminished performance.

B

beautiful_writer15A8

Participating Frequently

Quote:
Why don't ya'll quit ******** and start working. Perhaps you too will find the enhancements worth the percieved diminished performance.

Huh?

Why don't we what?

NOTHING is worth a 20 second freeze just because I chose another photo in the filmstrip....for me LR3 was light greased lighting...LR4 is (and I don't throw this word around easily) UNUSUABLE....period.

I can't afford to move a slider and have the screen go black and redraw, the CPU peg at 100% for 20 seconds only to find out that whatever amount of slider I changed wasn't correct.

I love the enhancements, but THOSE ISSUES clearly aren't even close to being worth it for me.

W

Wanchese West

Participating Frequently

"Why don't ya'll quit 'female dogging' and start working." Apparently the robo-moderator removes most colorful language.

I guess if I had the problems yuo described, I'd be logging some complaints too. My system is your standard 8 core 12gig Windows pos. My catalog is 413,000 images strong, so I did not elect to convert to the new process. Maybe that is what is saving me.

jameskachan

Known Participant

LR4 is unacceptable, RC1 or 2 — doesnt matter.  Clealry this product was rushed to support the new cameras (and thus forcing owners of those cameras to upgrade) because it is not ready for actual use whatsoever.

It's really questionable releasing software that is clearly not working as it should when a simple camera update of RAW support for the new Nikons and Canon for LR3 users would have sufficed. Clearly, Adobe saw the opertunity to get a large number of people to pay for the new version... in spite of it's failures.

I am a working professional so my interest in this is beyond passive, and while I can tell you I would happily upgrade (and have - though, not happily) to gain new features and enhancements, I dont enjoy being forced to do so when that comes at the price of a massive performance failure in professional workflow. Software that works great and is priced fairly (one thing I will commend LR4 for being...) sure thing! sign me up, take my money. no worries. — but only when it works correctly and speedily.

I'm quite disappointed, and negatively affected work wise.

Geoff the kiwi

Community Expert

Just so you all know, the Lightroom team are aware of these issues and are working to try and allevaite them.

A

Anonymous

"Just so you all know, the Lightroom team are aware of these issues and are working to try and allevaite them"

Yes, certainly.. Adobe couldn't let LR4 in such a bad situation ? LR4 RC2 is the worse thing I've seen from Adobe, curious distorsions on some images with Lens correction (from Adobe) and a very very slow process, with even a little database (less than 1000 images), particularly when you switch from one modul to another. It is soooooo looooong. I don't have these issues with LR3 nor ACR in CS5, with same images of course. So LR4 is now deinstalled and I will nomore use it until all things are corrected and this post concerning "LR4 slow" will be closed definitively.

I don't really understand why Adobe sale this kind of not finished software ? Why haven't they wait until this beta version is ok to bring it to the market ? I feel this LR4 RC2 is a BETA version and IT IS.

S

Susan S.

New Participant

I'm using LR RC2, and while it's not horrible, I'm finding that after a while using it the sliders get so laggy you can't fine tune accurately, and eventually it grinds to a halt almost completely. A restart of LR fixes it, so I'm quitting LR every thirty minutes or so to avoid issues.

Model Name: iMac

Model Identifier: iMac9,1

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.93 GHz

Memory: 8 GB

System Version: Mac OS X 10.6.8

I don't remember the beta being this bad, but I haven't used LR 4.0 or RC1 to compare.

M

Madscape

Participating Frequently

Even RC2 is much slower than the ligtning fast LR3.6 ..Nothing is more frustrating than moving a slider and the result happens 3 seconds after you stop. .. I think I'll be uninstalling Lr4 until I see that it's fixed. I'm sure it will happen.... but I'm not waiting and dealing with this .Toggling from Lightroom to photoshop has a 45 second load time ...Really ??? .. I bought the upgrade and have a serial number for downloading it in the future.. untill then ..I'll go back to my 3.6 which I used on a daily basis and was VERY content with ..

System :

Windows 7 home premium

Intel Quad Core i7 2600 3.40 GHz

Nvidia 405

12 GB ram

L

LR_Mowang

Inspiring

Just a comment... this is a general forum for LR. All these comments

are great.. but I would suggest you post them to the bug and feed back

page. Not sure how much time ADOBE spend monitoring this public forum.

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family

V

viramati

New Participant

Hate to go aginst the grain but strangely for me it has speeded up with Lr4.1RC2 and I am using a 3 year old top spec macbookpro!!! (2.66ghz 8gb sdram, 7200rpm hard-drive)

M

monstredeminuit

Participating Frequently

Count me in with same slow/lag problems.

RC2 still slow response/lag in Develop Module. It's "usable", but certainly not pleasant to use compared to LR3 was.

i7960

12GB RAM (rarelly goes over 50% when using LR)

64bit Win7 Pro

NVIDIA GTX 570

System Hard Drive: SSD OCZ-VERT 224GB

Photos Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar 2TB 7200RPM

Working on Nikon D3 12MP RAW-Lossless Photos.

LAG EXPERIENCED IN LR4RC2:

Very noticable in Develop Module

(even after all photo previews were rendered 1:1)

- when switching from one photo to the other

- when typing on X to eliminate a photo, and switching to another (it takes seconds for the thumbnail to turn grey with the black flag)

- Copy/Paste Effects from one photo to the other (major lag for the Synchronize pannel to show up)

- etc.

I have the Nikon D800 36MP on order. I'm affraid LR4 might become unusable with that kind of resolution...

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