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A
Alexej26157471r0v0
Participant
November 12, 2022
Answered

Lightroom loading pictures and previews very slow

  • November 12, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 13000 views

Hello everyone,

for a few days I noticed a problem with my Lightroom Classic.
Lightroom starts very fast and editing is also very good.
Nethertheless, after a few minutes of working, Lightroom becomes really slow loading images. It then takes several minutes to load the full-size preview of an image.

I thought that creating smart-previews might solve the problem, but after creating the previews for a view images, Lightrooms stopps creating the following. In this state, it is hardly possible to use the hard drive (external HDD with 4TB), also here it takes minutes to open a folder or load a picture.
When I close Lightroom, everything is fast again. Opening a folder or a picture takes no time and everything is really fast. When running Lightroom again, the same behavior appears after a few minutes.
At first I thought, this would be a problem of the disk so I checked it with the "chkdsk" command: everything seems fine. 

Because I haven't found any issues with the hard-drive itself when I'm not using Lightroom, I start to think that Lightroom might have a problem.

Is there anybody who might know this problem and possibly has a solution?
If you need additional informations, please let me know.

Thank you and with best regards,

Alexej


Some details on my setup:

Lightroom v12.0.1

Win10
16GB RAM
Intel i5-9400F, 2,90 GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

 

    Correct answer Alexej26157471r0v0

    Hi, I'm sorry to hear that.

    In my case, the problem was a faulty hard-drive. 
    The HDD had an failure while reading files. It was possible to navigate through folders, look and read single files.
    But the HDD stopped working if one would read or copy multiple files. The problem got worse over time, so performing a backup was hard or in some cases not possible.

    If your HDD shows the same behavior, I suggest to perform a full backup as quickly as possible and maybe try another HDD.

    Best regards, Alexej

    3 replies

    R
    Rene328160842z98
    Participant
    January 7, 2024

    I'm having the same problem here.  Running MacOS Monterey 12.7.2.  To download 16 images, it took about 30 second to "Checking free space on disk", I have 1.7 TB left on my disk, then took another minute to download the 16 pictures.  All the pictures looked "pixelated" as if full resolution wasn't there.

     

    A
    Alexej26157471r0v0AuthorCorrect answer
    Participant
    January 8, 2024

    Hi, I'm sorry to hear that.

    In my case, the problem was a faulty hard-drive. 
    The HDD had an failure while reading files. It was possible to navigate through folders, look and read single files.
    But the HDD stopped working if one would read or copy multiple files. The problem got worse over time, so performing a backup was hard or in some cases not possible.

    If your HDD shows the same behavior, I suggest to perform a full backup as quickly as possible and maybe try another HDD.

    Best regards, Alexej

    J
    Community Expert
    Jao vdLCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 12, 2022

    A few things. Please post the output of help->System Info. Second, smart previews do NOT help speed up anything on modern computers. they are only useful for editing your images when the originals are offline. so no surprise it didn't help. Your symptoms sound like a number of possibilities. One, you are slowing down due to a virus scanner constantly scanning the catalog file at every small change you make. Solution for this is to kill the virus scanner or to exclude the catalog file, associated preview files and image files. Second, you have a memory leak for some reason. This can be caused by certain plugins in Lightroom Classic but can have a number of reasons. Check the memory usage of Lightroom Classic in the system monitor. Third, your main hard disk (hopefully a SSD drive) is almost full. You need at least 1/3 of the main drive to always be available.

    There are probably a few more possibilities including some kind of hardware failure (the external HDD and its connection sounds like a possibility) but these are the more common ones.

      A
      Alexej26157471r0v0Author
      Participant
      November 13, 2022

      Hi,

      thanks for this detailed answer.
      The Systeminfo is attached to this answer. Unfourtanetly it is in german. I hope this is not a problem.
      The hint with the system monitor was perfect.
      When the issue occures, the HDD, where the pictures are stored, goes up to 100%, but no data is transfered... maybe it is a hardware problem and not a problem with lightroom.

      J
      Community Expert
      Jao vdLCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      November 13, 2022

      Try disabling the MIDI2LR plugin.

      Indeed the external HDD going to 100% is a hint that there might be a hardware problem. Potentially the access to this external disk is blocking for some reason and this will block Lightroom entirely when it happens. It appears your catalog is on this external disk too and not just the images interpreting your sys info dump?

      dj_paige
      dj_paige
      Legend
      November 12, 2022

      Nethertheless, after a few minutes of working, Lightroom becomes really slow loading images. It then takes several minutes to load the full-size preview of an image.

       

      Does this happen in the Develop Module or the Library Module, or somewhere else?

      A
      Alexej26157471r0v0Author
      Participant
      November 13, 2022

      This happens in the Library Module as well in the Develop Module.

       

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