Lightroom Desktop takes many minutes to switch to All Photos/People

[Jetfighter82]

I'm having a really horrible time with Lightroom at the minute, after a year or two of it functioning ok for me. (Prior to that, it was very slow and I had multiple support tickets in.)

It is just too painfully slow to use at the moment and, now that I've sold my DSLR camera and no longer shoot in raw or have need for any sort of advanced editing, I am seriously considering cancelling my subscription and moving to Google Photos.

I have just tried to switch from All Photos view (which took 3 full minutes to load) to People view, which took 7 full minutes to load.

My computer is fast, but Lightroom is slow. I don't know if it's the latest update, but I am just getting the blue spinning wheel of doom when navigating to All Photos or People view. I've rebooted multiple times, I am fully synced, I have run CleanMyMac and freed up RAM... no luck whatsoever.

I am using...

Lightroom version: 5.1 x64 [ 20211204-1710-0e71941 ] (Dec 4 2021)

macOS Monterey 12.0.1

I love Lightroom, I've invested a lot in it over the years (online learning, buying Lightroom Queen's books, using the Lightroom taxonomy/people recognition etc.) but I worry my time with Lightroom is up. 😞

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Thank you for the information and the software versions.

If you restart your Mac and allow it to sit idle for 5 minutes how much free space is showing on your hard drive?

[Jetfighter82]

Thanks for replying, Rikk. I have taken a screenshot for you of both my HD (which contains my Lightroom catalog) and my SSD which I use for Lightroom local storage.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Thanks for that. It rules out the main suspected culprit: Low drive space. 

Let's go step by step. The next item is to reset preferences: 

This procedure works for both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom Desktop.

If you are using Lightroom Desktop it can change the location of your local storage. Please review this setting after resetting preferences. 

Reset Procedure:

1. Close Lightroom.

2. Hold down [Alt/Opt]+[Shift] while restarting Lightroom.

3. Overwrite the Preferences when prompted by the dialog.

4. Close Lightroom.

5. Restart Lightroom.

[Jetfighter82]

I’ve actually already done this twice, after following advice on this
community. Both times it took 48 hours to check my library (150,000 images)
so don’t fancy doing it a third time.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

If you've done this, the next step is a clean reinstall of Lightroom. 

Clean Lightroom Install Procedure

1. Close Lightroom
2. Restart the computer
3. Use the Adobe Creative Cloud App to uninstall Lightroom
4. Restart the computer
5. Install Lightroom via the Creative Cloud App without launching any other programs.
6. Restart the computer
7. Launch Lightroom
8. Wait 5 minutes

[Jetfighter82]

Sorry I should've clarified in my original post (my error) that I already did a fresh install a few days ago.

Things I've tried:

• fresh install
• resetting preferences
• waiting for cloud sync to finish
• changing the location of my originals from a NAS to an external SSD
• removing all videos from Lightroom
• emptying my deleted items folder

I've been working on my photos this evening and it was working ok, then all of a sudden it got unbearably slow again and was taking a long time (and a lot of processor power - fan whirring, etc.) to move from photo to photo, even when doing something very basic like adding keywords.

These are not even big images - they're iPhone HEIC files.

Unsure what to try next! Sorry for not being clearer originally about the steps I'd already tried.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Did you try a reinstall by the method I outlined? It is designed to eliminate any effects from the current state of your machine. 

[Jetfighter82]

Yes I did Rikk, as I saw this exact same solution on another post (I think one of yours as I remember your name).

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

How many photos in the cloud? Has it fully synced?

[Jetfighter82]

147,000 at the moment (was 156,000 but following your book Victoria and
doing your workflow method to purge!) - fully synced to the cloud.

Last night I’d been working on my photos for maybe 45 minutes with no
issues. Then all of a sudden Lightroom started running incredibly slowly
again. Everything took ages to load. The fan in my MacBook was whirring
loudly and it was getting very hot.

No other apps were running at the time and nothing obviously changed on my
computer at the point where it went from running normally to running
slowly.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Oh so it goes reasonable speed some of the time but not others? Or it's always painful and that just got loads worse? That could be a good clue.

[Jetfighter82]

I’ve been using it a lot more over the weekend and I’ve found that at times
it’s very slow and sluggish, almost impossible to use. At other times (when
I can’t hear the fan whirring) it’s actually okay - seems completely
unpredictable. There is no pattern to it. Any ideas?

[Jao vdL]

What happens when you disconnect the external SSD drive? I think the problem might be your local image storage being reindexed constantly and perhaps there is an access issue to this drive (how is it formatted? - hopefully APFS and not some windows file system?). I find Lightroom Cloudy to work best when you don't have this and to rely on its automatic caching from the cloud so to use all default settings.

[Jetfighter82]

I haven’t tried removing the external SSD actually. I usually have it
connected at all times when using Lightroom. I can certainly try it without.

Yes it’s formatted using APFS and I actually reformatted it a week ago to
check if that was the issue.

[Jao vdL]

No clue whether this is the problem but worth trying. When the drive is disconnected, it should behave as if you don't have the option selected to have local copies of everything I believe. If access to these local images is somehow problematic and causes the hangups it would eliminate that issue.

[Jetfighter82]

Thanks for the suggestion. I've tried that this week when working on my photos and speed wise it's been ok, but I have found that with the external SSD disconnected I'm having other issues, like inability to delete photos. I'm doing a big purge so that's causing issues. I've found a workaround of just rejecting the photo instead of deleting but it's not ideal. I'll keep testing!

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Hmmm good thinking. Also rule out any anti-virus software that could be trying to scan LR's Library file?

[Jetfighter82]

I'm using a Mac and have never felt the need to install third party antivirus software so it's definitely not that!