Tired of the extreme slowness and the multiple problems my Lightroom Classic has.

Hi. After a long time digging through multiple forums, I’m laying out all my problems with Lightroom Classic, which I see are only getting worse. Obviously, if you can help me with any of them, great, but this is more of a post to flag things in the hope that someone at Adobe reads it, because in my opinion Lightroom needs a thorough overhaul. The app is becoming very hard to use, and the system requirements for a photo app are sometimes unreasonable.

My relationship with Lightroom has always been love–hate, but these days it almost always leans toward hate. I’m increasingly burned out and wish there were more alternatives on the market to make Adobe step up.

I’ll start at the beginning.

Overall—and this has always been the underlying problem with Lightroom—it’s incredibly slow. I’ve noticed this forever, but lately it’s becoming unbearable. My current laptop is a Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Gen 9 with an Intel Ultra 9 185H and an NVIDIA RTX 4070 (laptop) with 8 GB of VRAM. SSD of course, with the catalog on the SSD, and 64 GB of RAM. In short, a good laptop. I bought this computer to make up for Lightroom’s slowness on my previous five-year-old desktop and, well, yes, it got a bit better, but nothing dramatic. Lightroom remained sluggish the longer you used it and it gobbled up RAM and VRAM. And once you start using the new AI features, add a brush or two, forget it. RAM usage shoots up and everything slows to a crawl. I have to close and reopen it. The same thing happens when creating HDR panoramas—the program gets bogged down. And it doesn’t matter what I do, what I toggle on or off—it always happens.

And now for the little glitches.

I started the year with a catalog corruption where the Export menu suddenly stopped appearing. I’d click Export and the export window would never show up. After lots of back-and-forth with Adobe techs—with none of them having any idea what was going on—the only way we could fix it was by rolling back to a previous backup. There the option showed up again, and the conclusion was “corrupt catalog.” OK.

On top of that, photo imports have been failing for quite some time. Every time I imported a batch of photos applying a name, keywords, and metadata, the only thing it actually did was rename. It didn’t apply the keywords or metadata, and to get them applied I had to restart after the import. No update has fixed this, and it still happens.

Now there’s a new error during import. I’ve always imported and converted to DNG in the same process. Well, now you can’t convert to DNG anymore. Starting around photo 50, Lightroom starts eating RAM like there’s no tomorrow and converts veeeery slowly, sometimes even producing corrupted conversions. I end up stopping the conversion, restarting Lightroom, and applying the DNG conversion from the Library menu. But the whole thing becomes drawn-out and clunky, and I always have to import a lot of photos to begin with.

I no longer know what’s going on. I don’t know if my catalog is just too heavy (300,000 photos) and I need to do something about it—even though lots of people on this forum say the size of the catalog doesn’t matter—or if there’s something corrupted in the catalog. But more and more things keep breaking and I can’t work efficiently.

Right now I was about to buy a desktop and thought maybe a Mac Studio would solve my problems (people rave about it), but I’m afraid that won’t be the case and that this is a deeper issue.

In short, if any of this resonates with you, I’ll be happy to hear from you.