Mystery: Catalog Opening Speed

[photoguy1981]

Hi - I have a performance issue I can't figure out.

I have a catalog with 12,072 images that takes 8 minutes to open. The catalog folder is 3.52GB in size. This catalog was started in LR 4 by was updated since now I have LR CC 2015.10.

As an experiment I exported it to a new catalog with NO Previews. This preview-less catalog still takes 8 minutes to open. It's folder size is just 161MB.

I assume having no previews makes the matter of whether the original importation setting was for "minimum" preview or standard irrelevant.

(I have a third catalog with 3,327 images that opens in less than a minute!)

I am using a MacBook Pro (mid-2015) 2.5GHz i7 with 16MB RAM and 500MB SSD drive, running El Capitan.

Any insight/help would be appreciated!

Regards, TonyC

[dj_paige]

I'll take a guess ... you need to optimize the catalog. File->Optimize Catalog.

[photoguy1981]

I did. Optimizing made no difference at all.

- Tony Cortizas Jr.

Sent from my iPhone

[D.A.R]

Do you have a backup of the catalog in question? If so, How long does it take to open it?

If the same length of time then the backup suffers from the same ailment.

Create a new catalog. Does that open in a reasonable amount of time?

Import from another catalog (the original 8min) into this new catalog.

In any case I will assume a reboot of the machine with no other applications running.

[photoguy1981]

Dear Adobe Support - the mystery continues.

Thanks, commenters, for your suggestions. After all else made a difference, I did indeed start over by making a new catalog.

Basically, I can make a new catalog (e.g. 16K images) and it takes 3: 40 minutes to open. Then I "remove" 3K worth of images from the catalog and the catalog opening time does not change. The "previews" file size is indeed  smaller, so I don't understand what really determines the opening speed of a catalog.

Optimizing the catalog -- multiple times -- makes no difference!

TonyC