Lightroom causing huge battery drain

[traumamd]

I have recently purchased a 2018 MacBook Pro. When using lightroom classic the fan runs at full speed and you can watch my battery drain. This occurs whether or not i am using lightroom or just have it open in the background. Went to apple and they tested the laptop and it is not the problem and it only happens when lightroom is open, otherwise the computer works fine. I have heard that it is an issue with the creative cloud but have not heard about any fixes or work arounds. Thanks

[Sahil.Chawla]

Hi Traumamd,

Sorry to hear about the battery draining issue, could you please let us know the exact version of Lightroom and operating system you're working on?

Also, please try optimizing Lightroom's performance and see if it helps: Optimize Lightroom performance

Regards,
Sahil

[johnrellis]

LR has a number of activities it runs in background when you're not using it. Let's see if one or more of them is causing your symptoms.

Leave LR idle for at least five minutes. Then open Activity Monitor and see if LR is using much more than 10% CPU. If it is, follow the steps here to see if any of LR's background activities are running:

Re: Lightroom causing Mac to overheat

[swiftynz]

I second this motion. Also using a 2018 Macbook Pro and Lightroom Desktop uses twice as much battery as anything else (even editing a video on Final Cut Pro used less battery!!) As far as I can tell, my Lightroom is optimised and i'm not doing much with it, just minor tweaks but it will kill the battery.

Lightroom Classic version: 8.2 [ 1204643 ]

License: Creative Cloud

Language setting: en-GB

Operating system: Mac OS 10

Version: 10.14.4 [18E226]

Application architecture: x64

Logical processor count: 4

Processor speed: 3.1 GHz

Built-in memory: 8,192.0 MB

Real memory available to Lightroom: 8,192.0 MB

Real memory used by Lightroom: 789.6 MB (9.6%)

Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 2,432.3 MB

Memory cache size: 19.8MB

Internal Camera Raw version: 11.2 [ 134 ]

Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 3

Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2

Camera Raw virtual memory: 1MB / 4095MB (0%)

Camera Raw real memory: 1MB / 8192MB (0%)

Displays: 1) 2880x1800 !

[swiftynz]

For extra info, Lightroom when not being used idles at around 4-5 on Apple's Energy Impact Monitor, while other apps idle at 0 when not being used

[johnrellis]

LR does lots of stuff in background when you're not interacting with it.  See here if any of them are running: Re: Lightroom causing Mac to overheat