Inspiring

Question

Lightroom Cloud: why are the downloads so slow?

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
August 21, 2025
2 replies
515 views

I've been wanting to do this topic for a while, but lacked the time to actually to proper testing to exclude other factors.

I always found Lr to be pretty much unusable when used in "pure Cloud" mode (not stored locally).

I have investigated and made a video to measure properly the time of downloads.

Each photo takes 10s to load, quite consistently, and they are between 80MB and 90MB.

Taking the biggest file, that's puts the download at 72Mbps. At best.

10 seconds between editing 2 files is really not usable.

And given how aggressively Lr removes any files from the the local storage, after they've been uploaded, I would have expected something a lot faster, for a software that really pushes to be cloud only.

In the past years, I always had a small doubt about my internet connection.

Now that I have 8Gbps, with 936Mbps measured on the iPad (through WiFi 7), nothing else can impact this speed.

I don't get why the download are that slow.

And they're not any better on Mac.

Anshul_Saini

Community Manager

Hi @AlexJz,

Thanks for running those detailed tests and sharing your observations. Let’s narrow this down further:

Please update to the latest Lightroom v8.5.1 from the Creative Cloud desktop app and check if you still see the same download speed behavior.
If the slowdown persists, could you copy & paste your System Info (Help > System Info) here?
It would also help if you could share the screen recording and speed test results you mentioned. I can then forward these to the product team for deeper investigation.

Best,

Anshul Saini

A

AlexJzAuthor

Inspiring

I had to put the video on iCloud link, slightly to big to upload here directly.

Hope it works for you: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/038k_GVPX5ObUCYvEYo7TEupg#ScreenRecording_07-30-2025_14-11-28_1

Speed test on the iPad on WiFi.
But if I connect directly through a Ethernet adapter to get the full 8Gbps of my internet link, that doesn't change anything.

The downloads are way slower that the WiFi 7 here anyway.

I've just tried with the latest release; haven't done a full video, but I'm still at 10s per picture in any case

iPad Pro M4 - Lightroom iPad

A

AlexJzAuthor

Inspiring

Hey @alexandrej30933737,

Apologies for the very delayed response. If you're still experiencing the issue, try increasing your cache limit to use as much of your available hard disk space as possible. Keep in mind that you're downloading full-resolution files locally, so it will require significant storage.

^CM

@CMass I have now increased to 25GB the cache.

The download are still painfully slow...

Today it even increased quite significantly to an average of 14s.

To the point I seriously thought my connection maybe had an issue.. but no, all SpeedTest are still at 1Gb/s easy.

I'm now at an average of 50Mb/s of download on the photos, and I really cannot find any other explanation than your server throttling downloads on purpose.

@CMass could I receive an actual answer on this point?

I really don't see technical reason that would lead to this.

I've even ran a tool to check the write speed on the SSD.. without surprise, write speed is 1800MB/s, against the 6/7MB/s of download speed

iPad Pro M4 - Lightroom iPad

A

AlexJzAuthor

Inspiring

Hi @Anshul_Saini I've actually created a post a few days ago on that very same topic: https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-ecosystem-cloud-based-discussions/lightroom-cloud-why-are-the-downloads-so-slow/m-p/15469844

I've down actual tests to measure the download speed, and it's absolutely pathetic. Sorry to be that blunt, but 60 to 70Mbps, is slower than most 5G connections, even not in an optimal place.

I also did a speedtest on the exact same moment as the video.

I can give you a video of the syncing/download in question if you want, and speedtest screenshots.

There's clearly a very heavy throtling of the download speed.

But unfortunately, unless you always click on "Store locally" / "Make available offline", Lr is simply UNUSABLE.

This is made even worse by the aggresive nature of Lr purging any files from the local drive: as soon as pictures are uploaded to the cloud, everything is deleted locally, even smart previews.

iPad Pro M4 - Lightroom iPad

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