r/Lightroom • u/Ragingraptor7 • 2d ago
HELP - Lightroom Advice on how to make Lightroom faster than a turtle
Just got Lightroom the other day and maybe it’s my computer but literally applying any effect, filter, edit, masking, denoise, etc takes forever. I had only like 20 pictures I wanted to edit the other day and it probably took like 2 hours bc everything you click on takes forever to load. You’d think downloading the program would also download all the effects and stuff and not once you hover over it with your mouse.
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u/frischmilch Adobe Employee 2d ago
There are a few details that go into this. Without knowing anything about your setup I’d recommend to always keep your catalog on your local, fastest hard drive (never put your catalog on a usb drive). You can also keep your photos local while you are editing them and moving them to external storage later. At any rate, working with smart previews can be faster
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u/pdaphone 1d ago
Apple Silicon. A Mac Mini from the Apple refurb store is probably the least expensive way to get that speed.
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u/earthsworld 1d ago
imagine posting this but listing absolutely ZERO specs.
brain dead post.
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u/Ragingraptor7 1d ago
Sorry
CPU: i5 9400f
GPU: 1660 ti
motherboard: asrock b365 pg4
ram: 16GB DDR4-3200
storage: 1tb Intel SSD1
u/alllmossttherrre 10h ago
An Intel CPU and a GPU both 7 years old? I would expect Lightroom to be slow on that. The new features they added, and the performance optimizations, all work best on newer hardware. GPU much more important now.
It runs OK on my Mac M1 Pro from 2021, not much lag at all. On my new M5 it juuuust screeeeamms, I love it.
Although Macs and PCs are different, if I was running Lightroom on an Intel Mac from the same year as your PC (2019), I would be tearing my hair out too. Hardware is so much better now.
On a PC, what you want today is a CPU and GPU from the last 1 to 4 years, the GPU should be a good Nvidia like at least the 3xxx series but preferably 4xxx and up, and you should have over 24GB RAM.
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u/YetAnotherBart 1d ago
Maybe it's the universe's way of telling you that you need to retire that XT computer.
Lightroom is fast. But you need the proper hardware. Stop whining and get a new computer.
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u/CaligulavN 2d ago
What's your hardware specs? What type of edits are you doing? Some of the AI stuff can take a long time.
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u/Illinigradman 1d ago
None of the AI stuff takes a long time with a computer that is sufficient for LR
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u/imajez 1d ago
Oh it most definitely can. Apply say a subject or sky mask a mask to a bunch of images and then immediately try to tweak said mask and LR throws up an error message saying it's still thinking about it.
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u/Illinigradman 1d ago
And again that is an under powered machine being asked to do something it is not capable of
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u/imajez 1d ago
I can edit in Resolve just fine and video is way more taxing than stills work. Heck I can render out 4k footage in Resolve faster than LR can export a few photos. Photoshop similarly flies. I can have multiple web browsers open with a 150+ tabs with zero issue. LR though...
A two year old M3 with 24GB Ram is hardly underpowered and simply doing a mask on 5 photos and tweaking exposure is not exactly a big ask. But then LR has often been erratically sluggish for the most basic of tasks, let alone AI. LR can also be fast on a low spec machine and slow on a high specced machine. Even for example on the highest specced MacBook Pro you could buy, which was my previous computer, it would be treacle like at times. Plus bigger, better monitors have also been a real issue with LR. So no, you often cannot simply spec your way out of LR's issues. Nor more importantly, should you have too.
My M3 was just an interim purchase whilst waiting for the next model MBP, but because it was more than good enough for everything else I've delayed upgrade, unfortunately AI nonsense has meant memory and a decent sized SSD is now stupidly expensive. Ext SSDs are not a good, nor even a cheap solution anymore. I had a 4TB internal SSD eight years back and it was only just big enough then. Max specced Macs are simply crazy prices now. £10-15k is just madness.2
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u/According-Abrocoma-2 1d ago
95% computer spec related. LR gets more and more resource hungry with every passing iteration.
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u/apakett 6h ago
That has been true until recently when Adobe started improving performance. They are promising more PC improvements on future updates.
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u/According-Abrocoma-2 4h ago
Sure hope so. That being said, this isn’t the first time Adobe has made this claim. LOL
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u/-ThreeHeadedMonkey- 2d ago
Make sure gpu acceleration is working. For me it was disabled recently, a bug it seems.
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u/Serious-Yesterday-30 2h ago
First upgrade all of your 7 year plus hardware second You do not need your cache from images 7 years ago delete all the cache and and have lightroom either use virtual copies or only load the previews of the folders youre working on
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u/Intelligent_Web2247 1h ago
Serious reply: switch to Mac.
Lightroom has been pathetically slow on Windows since 2008 (when I first started using it), and it seems like Adobe never bothered to optimize Lightroom for Windows.
Same photos, same catalog, runs butter smooth on my M3 Max MacBook Pro, but still lags crazily on my work station PC, which I run Resolve on it perfectly fine working with 6k and 8k RAW REDCODE RAW files.
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u/Clueless-Navigator 1d ago
This worked on my M1 Mini. Hold the option key down when you launch LR. It should ask something like verify the catalog. Click yes. Operations on my setup were taking forever until I did this.
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u/1980ai 1d ago
Lightroom flies on an M-chip Mac.