Display Slideshow over entire catalog with acceptable performance

[matanee]

Dear Community,

I'd like to have the pictures from my Lightroom classic catalog displayed randomly over a slideshow. The slideshow module from lightroom classic is absolutely inadequate to do it, since it wants to render previews for every single picture before displaying the slideshow, and the preview for every picture takes 1-2sec to generate. So I'd need to wait for several hours before starting a slideshow, which is unacceptable. 

Do you have any ideas or know of any other software that can do that? This feature is very important to me, since I like to see my past pictures, therefore if there is no way to solve it with lightroom classic I'd be considering an alternative to lightroom. 

I already have the newest version of lightroom class installed.

Any ideas?

[JohanElzenga]

That's the way it is. Lightroom is a non-destructive editor, so edits are stored in the catalog and previews need to be rendered to see those edits. Normally Lightroom only renders standard-sized previews, but the slideshow needs 1:1 previews. That means that when you start a slideshow, those previews will have to be rendered first before the slideshow can start. There is no other app that can use a Lightroom catalog for anything and not have the same limitation.

The only way to solve this would be to render 1:1 previews for all your images manually, and then disable the preference to delete 1:1 previews after a certain time (by default 1:1 previews are deleted again after 30 days).

[Jao vdL]

The slideshow module in Lightroom Classic is just not very good. It's fine for a quick slideshow of just a small number of images, but not 1000's. If you just have a bunch of jpegs you want to do a slideshow of there are many better tools to do that. On Macs the built-in Photos app is quick and convenient. On Windows I don't know what people use as the main title I heard about seems to be out of business but perhaps others know.

[Todd Shaner]

If you're on a Windows system you can use the AutoHotKey program to preview your image files in full screen mode. Not sure how you could create a "random" selection, but you could use any of the Library module sort functions such as File Name, Capture Time, Added Order, etc. You would create a script that presses the right arrow key at the interval you want in seconds with LR in Full Screen mode (F key). I haven't tried it, but manually stepping through the image files in the Library module in full screen mode using the right arrow key works with no delays.

https://www.howtogeek.com/97998/how-to-make-your-computer-press-a-key-every-x-seconds/

(NOTE: 1000 = 1 sec. set the value for the desired interval)

#Persistent
SetTimer, PressTheKey, 1000
Right

PressTheKey:
Send, {Space}
Right