Lightroom Keeps Freezing

[Jeff A. Goulden]

Lightroom 12.3 has become unuseable this afternoon. It keeps freezing. It doesn't respond to anything I try to do with my mouse. All other apps are working fine. I can't even exit the program and have to use Task Manager to quit Lightroom.  I tried rebooting my Windows 11 computer but that doesn't help.  As soon as I start Lightroom it freezes.  Can someone please help.

[Jeff A. Goulden]

Thanks for all the suggestions.  My original problem is gone now.  It turned out to be caused by a corrupted hard drive that I have since replaced.  Lightroom detected the hard drive problem but responded by freezing and crashing.  I have been working with Adobe experts and they are aware of the problem.  I'm not sure if they have fixed the issue in the 2 subsequent Lightroom updates they issued since becoming aware of the problem.  My hard drive is fine now and I'm not encountering any freezing or crashing of the program.  There are still several annoying problems with Lightroom that I have encountered and reported but Adobe has not been responsive to those so I just adapt to them.

[Steve249608084d4g]

Hello Jeff,

I have been experiencing your same problem for weeks now.  The app just freezes constantly and is essentially unusable.  I'd thought the issue was Lr was sucking up so much RAM on creating thumbnails that it froze.  Using Task Manager at one point showed Lr was using 98% of memory.  I have used Disc Cleanup, Defragmented the Hard Drive, cleared the cache and rebooted my computer all to now avail. Corrupted hard drive was not on my radar.  Do you know of another way to address this without buying another hard drive?  Isn't there a way to "repair" the hard drive?

[Jeff A. Goulden]

Hi Steve,

Yes you can "repair" a hard drive if it is not too far gone.  Try running chkdsd c: /f /r /x from the command prompt as a system administrator.  I think this just bypasses any bad sectors.  This took care of my problem for a while until more bad sectors showed up.  Eventually I decided the constant problems were not worth it and I replaced the hard drive.  By coincidence the new hard drive totally crashed last week and was unusable.  I ran Dell diagnostics and when the bad drive was found the program ordered and shipped a new one to me.  It arrived yesterday and I installed it today.  Restoring from a week old backup was a tedious process but now I am back up and running.  Lesson learned.  Backup more frequently and to multiple backups.

[Steve249608084d4g]

Thanks for your reply Jeff.  I have run the chckdsd and it seems to be running much better, usable.  Whether it was a coincidence for me or not, mine started really bogging down after using the early access feature of blurring the background.  That, and I was editing a 1.08GB file, which also really bogged things down. I have a 4TB external drive which I use to back up all my pertinent files every night.  My desktop computer is 6 years old.   It is a gaming computer but I think with all of my recent photo editing I am really pushing the system hard graphics wise. I may add 16GB of additional RAM which should be fairly cheap and a lot less hassle than replacing the entire hard drive.  That should help with the speed and being overloaded.

[Jeff A. Goulden]

Did chkdsk report finding any errors.  You might want to run chkdsk again periodically.  You also might want to have an alternate backup besides your external drive.  My external drive crashed about the same time as the internal disk drive crash.  Fortunately I had a backup that was about 5 days old on a portable hard drive.  I was able to recover from that.  I lost a few days work and had to redo that.  No files were lost.  I'm also using Carbonite to backup in real time.  I had to recover some files from Carbonite.

[KR Seals]

I'm more inclined to believe that it is the OS that was having issues with the failing/failed drives and that was impacting LrC performance.

[WillingSpirits]

Glad you got it working. When I first posted, I didn't get any help from Adobe. However, I found I had a faulty disk drive. 
When I replaced the drive, Lightroom was bak to normal. So recently, when I began to have the same slowdown and freezing, I found a bad drive. Just to clarify, the problematic drives were now where my images files are stored. Didn't matter for Lightroom. If any drive is buggy, Lightroom complains.

[Jeff A. Goulden]

When I was having disk problems Lightroom DID NOT complain.  It just crashed with no explanation at all and some files got corrupted.  I had no idea that I had a hard drive problem until I randomly decided to run diagnostics.  Adobe tech support didn't suggest that I might have a hard drive problem.  I had to tell them what the problem was.  It would have been nice if Lightroom notified me that it was having a problem with a file instead of just crashing.