Lightroom is getting worse with each update

Can confirm, getting lots of "not responding" and infinite loading in Develop pane when clicking on thumbnails. I don't even have a lot of activity/catalog additions since I last opened it in 2021. 

I think adobe just want to push the mobile version. Hence giving it the Classic name. Soon it'll be called Legacy then Unsupported.

I, too, am finding the latest update of Lightroom very slow, and I'm fairly sure I've found a memory leak.

I've optimized my catalog of 93K photos, turned off face detection, and enabled GPU processing. My catalog is on an SSD.

When I start up Lightroom Classic version: 9.2.1 [ 202004070813-7699d98a ], (takes about 2 minutes), and let it settle in a folder in Loupe Mode, it is using 2.1 GB of memory. (my system has 32GB)

As I press the right and left arrow keys, going to the next and previous photos, back and forth, back and forth viewing two different photos - and do nothing else - the memory climbs with almost every keystroke.  After about 50-60 back and forths, its using 2.7GB. I pause and type on this comment, and the memory use remains constant. I go back to LR and go back and forth the same 2 photos about 30 more times, and now Lightroom is using 3.0GB. 

This is almost certainly a memory leak! And would in time cripple your system.

Please help me voice this concern to the right people at Adobe to have this fixed !

Paul Terry

paulbterry at gmail dot com 

Ok just a follow up on my earlier post, I have seen your post with the info on your SSD drives.

Another thought out of the box, Your computer performance will be limited to the weakest link. Could that be the USB connection to the External SSD.  The computer may be USB or USB 2. the SSD is probably USB 3.

Just as a follow-up to what Denis said, my images are spread across two internal hard drives and two external hard drives, None of which are the master hard drive on which Lightroom is installed. The computer is an old HP Pavilion desktop that really should be replaced but probably won't be. It only has 8 GB of RAM, won't accommodate any more. Lightroom performs reasonably well unless I try to assemble a 30 image panorama like I did yesterday. It took about 10 min. to finish the job. Three horizontal rows of 10 images. But at least it worked. Since I'm 76 years old, and not as fast as I used to be, I guess I can't complain about the speed.

Ok, I have been reading this thread and the only thing I can think of that is not available or discussed, is the storage capacity of your computer.

I saw the following in another thread this morning and thought it might have some bearing on the situation here.

From another thread.

"When you have that many photos, it's really not wise to place all of them on your main hard drive. As you might already know, the more empty space on your computer's hard drive, the more efficiently it works. Try not to fill it up beyond more than 2/3 or 3/4 MAX (I leave mine at around 50%)."

Another thought, you had the following in the original post "It's either sychronizing a folder or the metadata".

Have you selected a folder in the library module that has multiple sub-folders containing image files and other files and use the menu select the option "sycronize folder"?

Lightroom with it's performance glitches and freezing while doing database administration is simply making Lightroom unusable and not very productive.

Please post your system information as Lightroom Classic reports it, Yes I see bits if that, but please post as Lightroom reports it. In Lightroom Classic, click on Help, click on System Info, click on Copy. PASTE (DO NOT ATTACH) that into a reply. Include all info from first line down to and including plugin info.

A common cause of slowness in editing is doing a lot of local adjustments on an image (brusing or spot healing). This is made worse by 4K or larger monitors, and made worse by high megapixel original photos. If that's what you are doing, you can try turning off the GPU acceleration (although this may slow other things down).

"My question to Adobe: Is this issue being looked into? Will it be fixed soon? I have no issues with Adobe, it's pricing or it's products. BUT Lightroom has been getting worse and slower with every update IMHO. Others may disagree."

We are not Adobe in this forum. We are other Lightroom users in this forum. We cannot answer such a question. You need to ask Adobe, not us. The link was given earlier.

I will not recommend you decrease the size of your catalogs. I also have a 150 000 images.

What I know nevertheless is that synchronising a folder and metadata can be horrible and sucking all CPU as you mention. I have no solution to make them faster or run in the background unfortunately. I am afraid only ASOBE can work on that topic.

I just want to share my experience :
-I only synchronise folder when adding photos created by another application, but limited to one or 2 images in a folder not containing more than 500 photos. ( the best example being creating a copy in Photoshop and saving it in the original folder, then to see it you need to sync the folder in LR) In all the other cases, I use import.
-Metadata syncing is quite rare for me, but when I do it it takes a while and sucks all CPU. No work around except doing it by small numbers in each folder instead of a big folder with 10 000 images.
-I use to optimise my catalogs each time I exit LR. This takes some time but It does accelerate a lot LR when reopening LR and solve the metadata issue as well.
-I make sure that in my Catalog Preferences I check the box to write metadata with the file.

Hope it will help a little be but I realize it is not that much.

Best Regards
Eric Pecquerie

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