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Lightroom Classic, Macbook Air & High Memory Usage

Community Beginner ,
Jan 25, 2024 Jan 25, 2024

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Hello, 

 

For the past couple of months I've been ignoring a warning that CleanMyMacX has been popping up, telling me that my macbook has high memory usage and I need to do something about it. When I click on this, it tells me the main culprit is Lightroom. 

 

Please can someone talk me through (in simple terms, I'm great at cameras, reasonably competent at computers but rubbish at this bit) what I need to check? I delete lightroom backups every couple of months (I keep 3), and delete previews periodically (I am scrolling back through old photos as I try to tidy old photos). Its a 16GB M2 2022 macbook air, running ventura 13.2.1. I use Lightroom classic release 13.1. I've nothing against updating my macbook, I generally delay updates to avoid it causing any headaches with Lightroom. 

 

Thank you very much, Lyndsey

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 25, 2024 Jan 25, 2024

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I should have said, I don't notice any problems with lightroom (or any other software) running slowly. I've had the macbook about 12 months, and it's only in the past couple of months I've had this issue. I'm not aware that I've changed anything, but it's quite possible that I have without realising. 

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LEGEND ,
Jan 25, 2024 Jan 25, 2024

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Some info from your post:

 

  • MACBOOK Air M2 (2022)
  • MACOS Ventrura v13.2.1
  • 16 GB RAM
  • LrC v13.1

 

Some obvious inquiries come to mind. They may not solve anything but....

 

  • Why stuck back at MACOS 13.2.1, as Ventura is now at v13.6.4, numerous bugs would have been fixed, numerous improvements, and very likely improvements in the GPU driver (LrC is very sensitive to the GPU)
  • Why stuck on MACOS Ventura when MACOS Sonoma can be upgrade to on that MAC. Yes, initial their were huge issues LrC vs Sonoma, and Adobe recommends currently that it be v14.2.1 (issues with 12.2.0). Now this one may not provide improvements towards LrC (but I do not know that for a fact)
  • Does LrC crash?
  • If LrC crashes, did you get a crash report (Adobe)?
  • Does the MAC crash?
  • If the MAC crashed, do you get a crash report (Apple)?
  • What drive is the catalog on?
  • How much free space in % on the drive the catalog is on? Looking for at least 20% some say 25%
  • How large do you have the limit for the Camera RAW CACHE set to in /preferences/performance/?
  • In /preferences/performance/ If the Use Graphics Processor is selected as on (Auto or Custom) try it off. Any change?
  • Speaking of that GPU setting, what level of support is stated if you have it selected as on (Auto or Custom, if Custom try clicking on all boxes) Is it Full Acceleration? (just remembered that one, see 2nd link below)

 

Some Discussions to look at:

 

 

And a request (If I do not, then other members will)

 

Please post your System Information as Lightroom Classic (LrC) reports it. In LrC click on Help, then System Info, then Copy. Paste that information into a reply. Please present all information from first line down to and including Plug-in Info. Info after Plug-in info can be cut out as that is just so much dead space to us non-Techs and it takes up vast amounts of scroll space making the reply less readable and less likely that others will bother with your post.

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 26, 2024 Jan 26, 2024

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Thank you.

 

I'm downloading Sonoma now. The reason for not updating so far is Oct - Dec is my crazy season with work so the less that goes wrong in that time the better, therefore I try to change as little as possible.

 

Neither LR or the mac ever crash.

 

The calatlog is on my mac hard drive, the hard drive has 365GB free out of 1TB, I need to have a clear out and try to not to let it drop below 300GB (normally fairly sucessfully). So over 30% is spare. I keep the images I'm editing on my macbook hard drive, then move them to an external drive once editing is done. 

 

Camera RAW cache is set to 20Gb. Use graphics processor is auto, I've switched it off to see what happens. 

 

Will post System Info now

 

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 26, 2024 Jan 26, 2024

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Lightroom Classic version: 13.1 [ 202312111226-41a494e8 ]
License: Creative Cloud
Language setting: en-GB
Operating system: Mac OS 13
Version: 13.2.1 [22D68]
Application architecture: arm64
Logical processor count: 8
Processor speed: NA
SqLite Version: 3.36.0
Built-in memory: 16,384.0 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 16,384.0 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 1,328.8 MB (8.1%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 420,407.8 MB
Memory cache size: 308.4MB
Internal Camera Raw version: 16.1 [ 1728 ]
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 5
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2
Camera Raw virtual memory: 1077MB / 8191MB (13%)
Camera Raw real memory: 1076MB / 16384MB (6%)
Standard Preview Size: 1440 pixels
Displays: 1) 2940x1912

Graphics Processor Info:
Metal: Apple M2
Init State: GPU for Export supported by default
User Preference: Off

Application folder: /Applications/Adobe Lightroom Classic
Library Path: /Users/LyndseyAbercromby/Pictures/Lightroom/Lightroom Catalog-2-2-v13.lrcat
Settings Folder: /Users/LyndseyAbercromby/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom

Installed Plugins:
1) AdobeStock
2) Aperture/iPhoto Importer Plug-in
3) Export to Photomatix Pro
4) Flickr
5) HDR Efex Pro 2
6) Nikon Tether Plugin
7) ON1 Effects 10

Config.lua flags: None

 

 

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 26, 2024 Jan 26, 2024

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Looking at these links is helpful, thank you. In particular, I have 'automatically write changes into xmp' ticked. Is this the likely issue? I do have a feeling this is something that I may have selected at some point, althougth the reason escapes me. Is it another piece of software that is likely to have suggested this is on (based on the text that pops up when I untick it). I back up my images and my catalog up fairly routinely. 

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Community Expert ,
Jan 25, 2024 Jan 25, 2024

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Can you post the message that CleanMyMacX shows?

 

Generally, if macOS itself is not complaining about memory, and if you don’t perceive any slowdown, there isn’t an actual problem. Some apps that watch memory don’t properly account for how modern memory management works.

 

Another way to check is to open Activity Monitor (which comes with every Mac, it’s in the Utilities folder), click the Memory tab, and look at Memory Pressure.  If you leave this running as you work, and Memory Pressure is low and always green, there is no problem. If Memory Pressure becomes orange or red, then there is a problem.

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 26, 2024 Jan 26, 2024

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Thanks. 

 

I've been running activity monitor for the last house, and it seems like it's a fairly constant yellow. 

 

I'll post again next time I get the pop up from Clean My Mac. When I go into it it tells me the memory pressure is 63%. 

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 26, 2024 Jan 26, 2024

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Watching the activity monitor is quite addictive. It says memory used 14GB, and physical memory 16GB. This feels like a very high percentage is being used? 

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 29, 2024 Jan 29, 2024

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Screenshot 2024-01-29 at 22.24.06.png

 

Hiya, 

 

This is exact pop up I get. Activity monitor seems to run at yellow all the time, it does drop briefly to green after CleanMyMac does it's thing, then soon returns to yellow. 

 

I'm still struggling to understand whether there is an issue I need to do something about, or whether just to leave it. 

 

My LR catalog is large, could that be causing the issues? 

 

Thanks

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Community Expert ,
Jan 29, 2024 Jan 29, 2024

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Hi Lyndsey!! 

In my use of Macs since 1996 I have always been wary of and avoided Non Apple apps like this. Most have 'infected' Macs and cause more issues than they solve. Trying to remove them completely usually means wiping the drive and reinstalling the OS and apps.... of course they are designed so you 'use' them an hence feel they are 'useful'.. that's how they sell and run their business.  My recommendation is to view Activity Monitor if you are having issues and remove the foreigner....

 

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 29, 2024 Jan 29, 2024

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Thanks. I’ve been running activity monitor as well - it’s pretty much constantly on yellow. Are there any normal / expected figures for activity monitor?

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Community Expert ,
Jan 29, 2024 Jan 29, 2024

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Hi, sorry I haven’t followed up with your earlier replies, been very busy.

 

I do not think the size of the catalog should be the reason. How many photos are in it? Mine has over 150,000 photos and videos at this point, and it isn’t causing unexpected memory problems.

 

quote

This is exact pop up I get. Activity monitor seems to run at yellow all the time, it does drop briefly to green after CleanMyMac does it's thing, then soon returns to yellow. 

By @lyndseya54518626

 

OK. The CleanMyMac message is expressing concern about “RAM + swap.” I actually question that, because if they are only measuring those two things, that’s an outdated way to evaluate Mac memory usage.

 

Activity Monitor is more informative. Memory Pressure is a holistic look at the three ways that macOS handles memory demands: Physical (installed) memory, compressed memory, and swap memory. I may be wrong but it looks like CleanMyMac is both not accounting for compressed memory (because it doesn’t mention it), and over-weighting free physical memory.

 

Looking at the graph at the bottom of the Memory tab in Activity Monitor:

 

Physical Memory is what’s actually installed. If your Mac has 16GB, that’s the Physical Memory. Now, years ago, if you had 16GB and 15GB was used, utilities like CleanMyMac would warn of “low free RAM.” That was true back then, but today that’s less of a concern because of the ways macOS manages memory. If there is high demand for memory, macOS will next compress the contents of memory, so that for example, 1GB of physical memory is now handling 8GB of compressed memory. This is fine, and works quickly because of how powerful the processors are now. If that starts to get strained, then macOS starts to swap memory to storage, which is where swap comes from. As long as this system can handle the load, Memory Pressure is green.

 

In the Activity Monitor processes list, the Memory column is a total amount an app uses across the three resources, not just physical memory. That’s why it’s possible to see an application to report using more memory than is physically installed in the Mac. It’s possible because some of the memory it’s using is compressed or swapped.

 

If memory demands are very high, that act of juggling data between Physical, Compressed, and Swap can get too complicated. That is when Memory Pressure turns yellow, or even red if it’s really bad.

 

I think a constructive way to think about it is this:

  • If Memory Pressure is yellow, but you don’t see any problems, and if it is green most of the time, things are OK. 
  • If Memory Pressure is yellow fairly often, and you notice slowdowns and crashing, things are not OK and something needs to be addressed. 
  • If Memory Pressure is red, there are likely to be problems even if you don’t notice them yet. 

 

Regarding CleanMyMac:

  • If CleanMyMac’s warnings track pretty consistently with Memory Pressure going high yellow or red, then I suppose the CleanMyMac alert means something. But I wouldn’t assume the worst without also checking the situation in Activity Monitor.  
  • If CleanMyMac’s warnings appear even if Memory Pressure is green, I would conclude CleanMyMac is not using an up-to-date method to monitor Mac memory, which would mean their alerts are not useful. One thing that makes me question CleanMyMac is that low free physical memory and high swap usage do not, by themselves, necessarily indicate an immediate problem. That is why I’m interested in whether CleanMyMac is alerting too soon compared to Activity Monitor. 

 

If there are serious problems directly related to memory, memory can’t be upgraded in a Mac laptop after purchase, so the only route is to get a new one with more memory (and maybe sell the current one to help pay for the replacement, unless the current one is still within the return period). But 16GB in an M2 should be quite usable for Lightroom Classic unless your individual images are very large (like well above 40 megapixels), or if you keep many applications open.

 

The other thing is that there are posts here about people seeing unusual, alarmingly high spikes in Lightroom Classic memory usage that are not expected. If this turns out to be a bug and you’re seeing a form of it, it is possible that’s going to get fixed anyway, in which case you wouldn’t have to do anything. But we’ll have to wait and see on that one.

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 30, 2024 Jan 30, 2024

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Thanks. This is really helpful. I'm slowly starting to develop a very basic understanding of the different types of memory.

 

I have just over 400,000 photos in my LR catalog, it's a large catalog. It is over 4GB (it pops this warning up when I back it up). My photos are a mix of things, I use LR as a central point to manage both our family memories, so I have both mine and my husbands phone photos in here. I also have my work photos, I shoot with a Canon R5 so the files are a reasonable size. There's very little video from my Canon.

 

A quick look at the Canon files, and they are large, mostly 40 - 60MB. I do 95% of my editing in LR, I occasionally need to take them into PS and when I do I'm careful to flatten the file before takign it back to LR to manage the file size. I'm not noticing any speed issues using the mac, and I specifically bought it to work with these files. I think I either bought the bigggest memory available when I bought the mac (12 months ago), or there may have been one size bigger and the advice seemed to be this was only necessary if doign video editing. From a performance point of view I have no concerns with any of the software, there are no crashes and the speed is great. It is the CleanMyMac warning that is the only reason I've started down this path, which seems to be backed up by the activity monitor which is consistently yellow. I've attached a screenshot of my activity monitor readings below. 

 

I do have a reasonable number of apps open - generally I have mail, chrome, calendar, remember the milk (my to do list), LR, notes and whatsapp open all the time. I then open photomechanic, photoshop, canva, excel & word as and when I need them. Backblaze runs in the background keeping everything backed up

 

So I think I'm somewhere between your two bullet points above, with the reason being the size of the photo files, and the number of apps open. At some point I need to repalce my back up camera, which I think will be an R6, and I probably could use this rather than the R5 for a good chunk of shoots which would reduce the file sizes. And I could close some of the apps I'm not using, but I do tend to flit between them quite a lot. 

 

In terms of routine maintenance at the moment I remove photos I've finished editing from the macbook hard drive and move these to an external drive (the catalog stays on the macbook harddrive). I delete LR previews and backups (keeping 3) on a quarterly basis. I back up my LR catalog at least once a week, and backblaze is backing everything up constantly (as it's still not caught up). 

 

So I guess the question is whether there is anything else I can do at this stage (and if so what), or whether I ignore it until I start noticing performance issues? 

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 30, 2024 Jan 30, 2024

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I guess the longer term solution is moving to a desktop mac, we don't have anywhere to put one at the moment and a macbook fits better with family life, but I'm sure at some point in the future that will change.  

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Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2024 Jan 30, 2024

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Short term solution: you can turn off the CleanMyMac warning completely.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 30, 2024 Jan 30, 2024

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I've turned that off forever 🙂 

 

Am I okay to ignore the activity monitor being on yellow? 

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Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2024 Jan 30, 2024

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Ye, ignore the yellow and good news you rid yourself of ClenMy Mac it is just cluttering your Mac

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Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2024 Jan 30, 2024

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quote

Am I okay to ignore the activity monitor being on yellow? 

By @lyndseya54518626

 

If it rises and falls within low yellow and green, and you don’t notice any problems, it’s fine.

 

If it spends a lot of time in high yellow or into red, or if you start to see actual problems happening like slowdowns or crashes, it’s worth a closer look.

 

Here’s an example of when you do need to stop and figure it out:

 

I recently saw this happening with other Adobe applications, in the picture below. This is similar to the problems some other users have reported with Lightroom Classic. For some reason the app goes nuts with memory, the Mac slows down, and then they get the warning in the picture: “Your system has run out of application memory.” That is not supposed to happen, because it’s kind of crazy: If you add up the numbers shown, they add up to way more than the 32GB in this Mac! I know where it’s going, macOS has put everything beyond 32GB into compressed memory or swap, but the point is in normal use we should never see that Apple warning.

 

If you ever see the alert message in the picture below, come back here and talk about it some more, because then there is a real problem of some kind. (I still don’t know what the cause was of this problem, I worked around it by breaking up my modest video project, which is so basic and simple that the memory problem should not have been caused by complexity.)

 

Premiere-Pro-memory-usage-excessive.jpg

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 31, 2024 Jan 31, 2024

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Thank you, I'll back back if / when I get that issue. 

 

 

 

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New Here ,
Sep 22, 2024 Sep 22, 2024

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I am having this exact problem on my brand new MacBook M3 Pro with 36 gb Ram when I run Lightroom. It's happened twice when I work in Lightroom and leave it open and come back to it the next day it gives me the “Your system has run out of application memory.” error you mention above.
I've only had the laptop for a week and certainly wasn't expecting any problems with the memory!

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Community Expert ,
Sep 23, 2024 Sep 23, 2024

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LATEST

@kcslagle 

 

Pleasee start a new thread describe your issue there. This will ensure that any info given is specifc to your question rather than one that's 9 months old. Also, include a copy of your 'System Info', which can be obtained from the LrC Help >System Info menu item. 

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LEGEND ,
Feb 01, 2024 Feb 01, 2024

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Get rid of CleanMyMacX. Its garbage software and you are better off without it.

Using most of your RAM is fine. Its there to be used, and Apple is really, really good at memory management.

You should have at least one external drive for backups (what if your computer is stolen? Everything is gone without backups) and you may want to move your photos to an external SSD. You can find USB-C drives pretty cheap (https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-storage/ssd) and those will be plenty fast.

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 02, 2024 Mar 02, 2024

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13.2 Classic is a great leap forward in terms of memory management on the Mac.

 

That comes at the expense of slower photo loading in the develop module, however.  In previous versions, it was not worth generating previews as they appeared so quickly in Develop.  But it was obvious that memory management had received no professional attention.  For several years.  Which is kind of sad for a product coming out of a company of Adobe's size.  Someone has had a go at making Lightroom Classic more economical with memory use, but managed to make image loading into Develop slower.  I realise that Apple are not always very open about their APIs, but a key app developer such as Adobe should be able to work more closely with Apple to get the best out of the latter's hardward.

 

So, two steps forward, but one back.

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Community Expert ,
Mar 02, 2024 Mar 02, 2024

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quote

In previous versions, it was not worth generating previews as they appeared so quickly in Develop. 


By @jrp2012


The previews you can generate and the develop previews are two different things.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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