Beware upgrading to LRC 10.1 on mac OS

[g.parker]

Since this LRC forum still has an announcement from December 8 celebrating the release LRC 10.1 pinned at the top of the list, somebody has to say this bluntly:

If you are running mac OS, upgrading to LRC 10.1 could be a bad move.

Personally, I would say just leave it alone. If you're still at version 9, you might want to stay there for now. Moving to LRC 10 will force an upgrade to your catalogs, making it difficult to revert to version 9. If you're at 10.0, do not be tempted to upgrade to 10.1. It could certainly make your life much worse.

There are a huge number of users reporting freezing and crashing bugs with the 10.1 release on their Macs. I am one of them, and I have posted my own system console log clearly showing that the Mac's builtin GPU is locking up at the system level. For me, this causes the entire machine to sieze for 15 to 30 seconds, after which I regain control. Then it happens again, and again. For others, the symptoms are even worse. I can guarantee this is a real and serious problem.

Judging from recent traffic on this forum, I'm concerned that a great many users are being unwittingly hammered by this bug. We can only assume that a small percentage are actually showing up here in this forum to report their situation, and many more are just wondering what the heck is going on.

It seems that Adobe is well aware of this bug (how could they ignore it with so many reports coming from all over?). And yet, without acknowledging the devastating severity of this problem, Adobe tech support's only advice has been to disable the GPU. That is a highly unsatisfactory response. It is a tacit admission of serious bug for a piece of software that relies on a GPU for the computational performance that makes it a useful tool in practice. Would they also advise a motorboat owner with a broken engine to just switch to a pair of oars?

I am a career software developer, and I have a remarkably high tolerance for bugs, but I also expect accountability and transparency from vendors that get my money. I'm not seeing that here, and it's frustrating.

Adobe should issue a formal statement about this problem immediately. At a minimum, they should advise all Mac customers that frequent freezing has been widely reported with the 10.1 release, and to be prepared to revert to an earlier release if they experience these symptoms.

[JP Hess]

Although it's true that the catalog must be updated to be compatible with Lightroom Classic 10, the previous version of the catalog is left on the computer intact and completely available. So if it's necessary for the user to revert to Lightroom Classic 9 the previous catalog is still there and accessible, ready to be used as soon as LrC 9 is reinstalled.

[g.parker]

It's true that the old version 9 catalog is not deleted in the upgrade process, so if a user immediately reverts, they won't have any problems (other than missing features they might have expected to use from version 10). Of course, that's assuming the user doesn't do any aggressive cleanup on old (theoretically useless) catalog files.

What's happening in real life is that users are doing lots of work after upgrading to version 10, and all that work is captured in their version 10 catalog. Then, this problem hits, either because of some change in their pattern of use, or because they upgrade to 10.1. Now they have to choose between downgrading to version 9 and losing their work since upgrading, or staying with version 10 but disabling the GPU.

It occurs to me that it might be possible to export .xmp sidecar files from version 10, then re-import them back in version 9. What I said is that it would make it difficult, which I think is valid.

[Rob_Cullen]

"If you are running mac OS,"

Ahh, but which OS?

! Lightroom-CLASSIC System requirements

TBMK Adobe's policy is to only support the last three (or will it be 'two') Operating Systems.

[g.parker]

I'm on mac OS Catalina 10.15.7, which is a recommended OS according to that Adobe link. Mine is the most up-to-date Catalina available, and Catalina is still by far the most widely used version of mac OS (almost 70% of Mac users).

Bottom line: I think this issue applies to a large chunk of the user base.

[g.parker]

FYI: LRC 10.1.1 seems to have the same problems with hanging the system as LRC 10.1.

[Ian Lyons]

Unfortuantely, 10.1.1 only fixes a cloud sync issue. This is specified in the Announcement at top of forum page.

[kmserr]

Yes, EXACTLY what is happening to me. 

[janmalycz]

As wrote this on many other threads here already. Adobe is totally ignorant about this problem.

On late December Adobe's tech support chat kept telling me that this problem is caused by my network drives attached (everyone who understands sw development at least a bit, knows this is totall nonsense). Closing my ticket without noticing me after I've kept telling him that this is serisou GPU bug and needs to be reported and 10.1 (now also 10.1.1) update pulled. 

Level of my furstration with Adobe's products, LrC especially has reached the trashold. Photoshop 2021 also has extreme number of bugs and memory leaks. We are paying for the worst sofware I've come accross in decades. 

• unprofessional tech. support, extremely hard to reach, long waiting times
• "placebo" updates with super tiny new features added
• features added vs bugs added ratio each release is 1:10 or even more...
• No AI features, no noise reduction algorythm updates, no object/face detection, retouch etc. changes added
• LrC runs as one process that makes the whole app extremely slow until it finishes it's background tasks, while CreativeCloud.app runs at lest 10-15 tasks for syncing etc. in background 
• EXTREME memory leaks for both LrC and Photoshop, both RAM and GPU memory