LIghtroom Using 38GB of memory

[karing75710986]

I am using Lightroom Classic on my almost brand-new MacBook Pro M2 Max 64GB laptop. I was going through a few thousand photos and it would occasionally freeze, even sometimes producing the dreaded spinning wheel or sometimes a frozen wheel.

I created 1:1 previews but there was still a lag of 1-2 seconds for the next photo to come to resolution when I cycled through photos rating them. Lightroom Classic is using 38GB of ram. My screen also flickered while using it, especially when exporting (around 450 photos). My computer also got quite hot while exporting. Once I tried to quit, Lightroom froze and wouldn't respond - I had to force quit. My screen stopped flickering after I quit. 

After restarting Lightroom and making a few edits to a few photos it got up a reasonable 12GB ram usage. It seems that when I use lightroom for an editing session (taking a few hours) it starts having problems.

It feels like I shouldn't be having these problems on such a strong computer. Any advice? 

I'm running Ventura 13.5 with Lightroom Classic 13.0.2 and Camera Raw 16.0. My photo files are raws from a Sony A7iii.

[Seaquence]

If you're initialy only doing image selection for these thousands of shots, do yourself a favour and purchase Photo Mechanic. Way quicker and you can send the edit directly to LrC when your done. LrC is a great program but for doing the first edit, it sucks.

[KR Seals]

As @Seaquence says, Photo Mechanic is the best tool for culling large numbers of photos. It is very fast to go through the photos (even full sreen) to let you pick the ones you want to bring into Lightroom Classic. Those do not have to be the final ones that you will process in LrC, but it gives you a much smaller number of images that you have to import. The process is to pick (Tag) the ones you want to import and delete the ones you don't. That way LrC is not making previews of files you will delelte anyway. 

Photo Mechanic allows you create and name a destination folder and rename the files it will copy to that folder.

My travel machine is a 2021 MBP M1 Max 64GB. I sometime shoot thousands of images of wildlife and airshows. I usually don't process the whole event on LrC on the MBP, but I do import the images after culling into LrC. When I get home, I will export all the trip photos to my NAS JBOD drive to import into my main catalog on my PC. My MBP hardly ever gets warmer that room temp, but I not exporting hundreds of images either.