Slideshow not working; nothing is particularly fast

[pigfender]

I am having problems with Slideshow in Lightroom Classic. I've got a brand new Mac with ample "power" (M3 Max, 64GB RAM and TBs of free SSD space) and the latest versions of MacOS and LIghtroom Classic.

But... instead of being blisteringly fast, exporting and creating previews doesn't feel any faster than the 10 year old laptop it's replaced, and Slideshow doesn't work at all. Can anyone help? 

[GoldingD]

PLease post your MACOS version.

[pigfender]

I'm on the latest versions. Brand new Mac, all updated.

So... MacOS Sonama 14.4.1. LRC 13.2 CameraRaw 16.2

[pigfender · Accepted solution]

Okay, I've figured it out. I have to say, this was with no help from Adobe's customer support who spent an hour on my machine, mucking about with things, making claims that are just not true before I eventually had to call them out for not knowing what on earth they were talking about and kicking them off.

The solution in the end was that one of the songs I'd used in the slideshow wasn't working. It was good enough to play normally as a track, but presumably had sufficiently corrupted metadata or some other attribute that was crashing the Slideshow module if it was used anywhere in the track. Deleting the song and replacing it with another has fixed the issue and everything is now working as it should.

Things tried or claimed by the Adobe customer support human (all without success) included:

- just pressing play 10 times in a row expecting something different this time

- delete all your preferences you've spent 9 years getting how you want

- making LrC run in Rosetta emulation

- Slideshow only works with Collections (absolute rubbish)

- Slideshow won't work if it contains any photos that have been synced

It was these last two (blatantly wrong) claims that convinced by the guy had no idea what he was talking about so I kicked him off before he tried to delete all my syncing data.

But, anyway... final answer in my specific scenario was a corrupt music file in case anyone has a similar issue in the future and want something else to try!

[mikeinbrazil]

But is it still ridiculously slow and does it "rebuild the previews" every time? That was my experience. Even if i selected only a few images it would try to rebuild (and hang) the entire folder 

[pigfender]

It's still much slower than I'd expect. Exporting photos is pretty quick, but loading slideshow previews and exporting slideshows both seem no faster than in my old 2013 MBP! Definitely some missing optimisation here (does the slideshow model not use multiple cores?!).

On your specific question re: building the previews - it does it everytime I do a new session, but if I rewatch a slideshow preview it's built once (that session) already, it doesn't rebuild... unless I've made changes.

[mikeinbrazil]

thanks, my objective is to export to video so i can review at leisure on tv.  It worked reliably from 2014 to 2017/18 and then became almost useless to me. It would take hours or just plain hang and never finish. 

Now i have a Mac Studio with 64gb ram and it still seems slow. Seems they have not invested a single penny in this feature. Max resolution is still only 1024p too