Lightroom Classic Slow and Chunky on Top-End Mac

[DakotaCreates]

Hello fellow Adobe users!

I've been waiting to post this, but after several updates both to MacOS and Lifgroom Classic passing, and the issue remaining, I figured i should ask now. I've been having issues with performance that simply dont make sense, as photoshop, being a more resource intensive program, runs like a dream on this machine:

2018 MacBook Pro

500 GB Flash SSD

32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 Memory

2.6 GHz 6-Core i7 CPU

Radeon Pro VEGA 20 GPU (4 GB Memory)

I'm fairly familiar with troubleshooting pages and performance settings, but havn't been able to see a difference. GPU acceleration on and off, free hard drive space, purging cache, etc. While editing and renderign are quite fast, which is to be expected with this hardware, navigation is extremely frustrating. Scrolling especially, though the grid view and through the file map on the side bar, is slow, chunky and choppy. Loading previews also seems slow, even though my entire library has both 1 to 1 and smart previews rendered for all images. My 1 to 1 previes are also set not to delete after 30 days. I should also note that I dont use especially large images, most are under 15 Megapixels. My Large files are my .PSD and .PSB composites, which are stored on a seperate drive.

If anyone had experienced these issues, or has any more suggestions, I would really appreciate it! Its ongoing and hasnt been effected by updates or settings, which is a bit frustrating.

Merry Christmas all!

Thanks again

[Jao vdL · Accepted solution]

>my entire library has both 1 to 1 and smart previews rendered for all images. My 1 to 1 previes are also set not to delete after 30 days.

You DO NOT want to create 1:1 and smart previews to speed up scrolling. It actually has a detrimental effect as after every small change Lightroom will create a new 1:1 preview and loading 1:1 previews is actually slower than normal sized ones. 1:1 previews are only useful if you are a fashion or portrait shooter and want to very quickly make selections based on critical focus. In that case you are generally better off importing the images using the embedded previews and simply using those. if you generate them Lightroom should be set to auto delete after a short while.

Smart previews are ONLY used if you edit with your images offline (for example if you store them on an external disk and you want to edit away form the office without the external disk there), or to speed up editing but that is not your issue so do not set them to create as you will just slow down your machine while it is creating them and use up a lot of harddisk space.

For speed, you should only have standard previews set to auto size, which will make previews large enough for your main display. There is little point in creating 1:1 previews if you rarely zoom 1:1 in the library view. If you zoom 1:1 in Develop, the 1:1 preview is not used at all, so in most use cases 1:1 previews are useless.

[DakotaCreates]

thank you for your reply! I do use Smart previews for offline editing quite often. However, for quite some time I've been under the impression that having the 1 to 1 previews rendered in advance is more efficient since the machine wont have to load them when zooming in to 100%, which i do almost exclusively in the Develop module and rendered them for that very purpose lol! I will remove the 1 to 1 previews and see if that makes a difference. Thank you again, that was a great peice of information to learn