Lightroom Classic get’s really slow when exporting big sized raw’s into medium jpgs

[ingmarwein]

Hello everyone out there, another day - another Lightroom problem after upgrading to Mac OS Catalina. 

I’m working as a band photographer, exporting about 500-1000 images per gig including backstage photos and so on, with currently three gigs per weekend. So about 3K images that need to be exported per weekend. Camera is a Nikon D850 with 48 something Megapixels. 

So far Lightroom has been doing a great job with exporting these files into medium sized jpegs, but it got slow like - really slow. 700 photos at the moment do take something around 4 hours to export, that sucks. 

My export settings are at JPEG with sRGB, Quality 100%, resizing images to 2500px with 240 pixels per inch. 

Now, when I’m exporting files with 2000px Lightroom does somewhat of a reasonable speed, but 2500px and everything about does cause that problem. I could technically export the band stuff with 2000px and it should be fine, but I can’t wait for the next weeding to happen with the same amount of photos being exported with 5000px. That’s going to take years, yay. 

What I’ve done so far - clean install of Catalina. Reinstall of Lightroom. Reset of the LR preferences. Cleaned up my Mac with now about 100GB free space. Allowed Lightroom to use some 70GB of space for the Camera Raw Cache. Tried exporting with GPU on and off (with restarting in-between). Problem occurs with all catalogues, also occurs when using the internal 500GB SSD as well as the external 2TB HDD.

System runs with: 

Lightroom Classic version: 8.4.1 [ 201909111355-eb9b68f0 ]

License: Creative Cloud

Language setting: en-CA

Operating system: Mac OS 10

Version: 10.15.0 [19A602]

Application architecture: x64

Logical processor count: 8

Processor speed: 2.8 GHz

Built-in memory: 16,384.0 MB

Real memory available to Lightroom: 16,384.0 MB

Real memory used by Lightroom: 4,712.4 MB (28.7%)

Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 12,670.5 MB

Memory cache size: 901.2MB

Internal Camera Raw version: 11.4.1 [ 291 ]

Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 5

Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2

Camera Raw virtual memory: 1645MB / 8191MB (20%)

Camera Raw real memory: 1675MB / 16384MB (10%)

Displays: 1) 3840x2400

Graphics Processor Info: 

Metal: NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M

Application folder: /Applications/Adobe Lightroom Classic

Library Path: /Users/Ingmar/Pictures/Lightroom/Macbook Internal.lrcat

Settings Folder: /Users/Ingmar/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom

Installed Plugins: 

1) AdobeStock

2) Aperture/iPhoto Importer Plug-in

3) Facebook

4) Flickr

5) HDR Efex Pro 2

Anyone here with the same problem, any idea what to try in order to get a decent export speed again? Thanks for your help already, appreciating it!

Best, 

Ingmar

[alpshiker]

I have no solution to offer for your case, but just wanted to comment. I waited until July this year to upgrade to Mojave from El Cap. All seemed fine at first, until I worked with large files. Then the memory would fill up right to 100% (had 16Gb) and the program would freeze. I tried moving the cache folder to another location, resetting the permissions, to no avail. Finally, I decided to do a fresh intall of Mojave and to import my files from there. The problems magically disappeared. It seems that some corrections had been brought in recent months to Mojave regarding memory usage and big files, that the clean install implemented, were the simple upgrade had not. Maybe, try a clean install if the problems persist. Catalina is still under development and fixes are added almost weekly.

oops... you did a clean install already.

[ingmarwein]

Thanks for your answer. Having the same problems with the memory, it's up at a 100%, making the computer useless for other tasks. And as said above, already did the clean install of Catalina. Sounds like it's a waiting game at the moment with the hope that any update might fix that anytime soon. 

[Randy Hufford]

Personally I make a living using and editing my images and printing from them. I NEVER upgarde to a new OS until it been out for over a year, and I have to Absolutly have to upgrade. If it is not broke why fix it? Everytime i do OS upgrades i have HOURS of dealing with issues. It is such a pain that software manufacturers force us to upgrade when everything is working. Hopefully you made a bootable backup before you did upgrade so you can resore to your previous OS. If not, do a fresh install of your previous OS that worked. I have a MAC 2011 and I am still running Sierra. WOrks way better than a new OS that everyone is having issues with. I REPEAT unless you are totally forced to upgrade just wait. On my Sierra machine I only did this upgrade because the newest version of PS and LR had to have it. UNLESS IT IS BROKE DO NOT FIX IT.

[ingmarwein]

Thanks for your advice Randy. You're right in the perspective of not trying to fix stuff that's not broke. On the other side I'm trying to have my working machine as updated as possible in terms of security related issues. New updates also do involve new safety features. 

There is a bootable backup from the old OS. I'd love to avoid the same process of doing a clean install if possible though, but will definitely keep your advice in mind before doing the next upgrades in the future 🙂 

One more question, do you have any idea what could possibly cause to really slow behaviour of LR? PS is doing fantastic and with good speed, it's just LR while exporting.

[johnrellis]

"JPEG with sRGB, Quality 100%"

It's not likely the cause of your slowth, but exporting at 100% creates unnecessarily large photos.  Quality 80% will create images that are visually indistinguishable from quality 100% but that are less than half the size. Seehttp://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality

[bellevue scott]

I don't think it's likely that it's because the jpgs are being exported at 100%. I found this year old thread because now my Lightroom is super super slow. When I import or export, or when LRC is processing files, the computer becomes absolutely unusable. I can't even move the mouse. And I'm on a Mac Pro with 6 core with 64GB RAM and two D700 graphics cards. 

There is just no reason for this, whether exporting at 100% or 80% quality for jpgs. A program shouldn't hog so much CPU and RAM that you can't even move your mouse. For me, I've tried different export settings, but it's always the same. 

This thread might be old, but honestly I have not used LRC much in the last year or two. I've come to hate it so much that I just can't bring myself to open it unless I'm doing a lot of batch editing, because, well, Adobe ruined it about the time they split it into LRC and LR, tryiing to force users to their still beta and poorly thought out LR cloud solution. 

Anyway, I too now am trying to determine why LR is so pig slow and holding my computer hostage to even the simplest of tasks as I export 500 jpgs. 

[dj_paige]

There is a reason. Lightroom Classic does use the CPU heavily when doing large exports and large imports. This was a decision by Adobe to speed up Lightroom Classic exports and imports.