Lightroom Classic: Import is slow after updating

This was 7 months ago. Where does this stand, as I keep my products updated and it is still unacceptably slow.

slow import is unacceptable, especially after 7 months of official respond. Please update when import will be fixed.

An update please Adobe. You are soon to lose a customer. 

Me too! I have been suffering for months and am so over adobe! Please fix this!

We had this issue at one of my studios. The fix is kinda simple. Go to file- and create a new catalog. We have so many photos at once it took time for Lightroom to process the whole catalog and import etc. Just don’t lose the previous catalog, you should be able to switch in between. Let me know if this works for you guys. Thank you.

I think most of us with large catalogs have thought about this use of multple catalogs.  I know I have.  However, I have collected over the years a great number of Lightroom books, including those penned by Victoria, the Lightroom Queen, and I cannot recall any pundit ever recommending to go with multiple catalogs.

Even Scott Kelby in his newest tome for LR Classic CC stills recommends going with one catalog.  He knows photographers with 6 million images in their catalog.  (I have 3.48 million in mine.)  Multiple catalogs might entail keeping multiple sets of presets if the presets are kept with the catalogs.

What would be a better solution is for Adobe to switch from SQLlite to a professional relational database such as MS SQL or Oracle.  Then data and metadata like presets could be retained in their own database tables and any number of catalogs—which could be smaller and topic-specific—would be able to be loaded and unloaded quickly whilst still being able to use the presets collected in a separate db.

3.48 million is getting on the chunky side, and I could see why the import could be slow as it does duplicate detection. While I usually only recommend a single catalog, there's another possibility that you could consider for this scenario is a small working catalog for the stuff you're working on right now, and then transferring into your huge archive catalog when completed. That's page 432 in my Classic book.

Too right!  On the other hand, supposedly there are ones double that size.  I friend in Hong Kong has one that was over 4M images when we were in Iceland last year.  Who knows how large it is now as he is a prolific shooter.

I have your book, and believe me I have thought about your suggestion.  On the other hand, I never had this issue with LR6 once I moved from the MacBook Pro with a 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM to the MacPro 'trash can' with a 4TB SSD and 128GB RAM.

Everything slowed down with LR 7, and I'm not the only one with this observation—this forum is filled with this complaint.

I see that Rick Flohr has cross-referenced the thread against the bug you referenced and posited a possible fix, so the problem of the 'ghost' dngs is real.

I also see that AR is still slinging accusations around as of seven (7) minutes ago.  Does this guy know when to stop?

Yeah, I've seen a 7 million. I haven't tried importing into it though.

> Does this guy know when to stop?
Historically, no. He's a very knowledgeable guy and my go-to for color management, but knowing when to give up has never been his strongest point.

I've seen larger image databases in the medical imaging industry, but none were using LR; not even sure if LR can import DICOM images which is what that industry has standardized on.  In any event, the underlying database was always a full relational DB such as MS SQL, Oracle, or DB2.  Part of the performance issue has to be centered around Adobes' use of SQLlite.

However, this still does not explain the serious performance degradation with LR 7.  My catalog has only grown by about 20k images since moving over to LR7, but the slow import process has been present from Day One.

It is not consistent.  Some imports go so fast its like the good old days; most are very slow.  I tried with another catalog which had about 20 images in it.  The catalog came from one of the LR guru books.  Importing (after the catalog was converted to the LR7 format) was still slow.  And the dng ghosting could not be replicated, but then again, it hasn't manifested itself in my main catalog either.

LR is also a memory hog, even while idle.  Overnight or during the day it will gobble up 75GB of RAM.  Frankly, I've never seen ANY program on my MacPro (and I've got the DxO suite, the FranzisPhoto suite, and others) use that much memory!  Not even Photoshop.

What's going on here, do you think?

I wish I knew David. 

Well, if you're befuddled then we're all in the soup, aren't we?  LOL

Earlier I started up LR6 and loaded the original catalog (which I kept).  I'm importing a folder from a 20TB G-Tech Thunderbolt-connected drive which has 989 images, Sony .arw raw files and matching jpegs.  The raws are from the a7RIII and they're huge, around 65MB each.

The folder is a copy which LR7 has not seen.  The import started 20 minutes ago and...well, it just finished importing as I type and 1:1 previews are now being built.

Same hardware, same OS, same everything except the version of LR.  Based on the progress bar, I'm estimating that LR6 is at least 300% faster than LR7 for the very same import.

And let's bear in mind that the LR6 version of the catalog is 37GB, versus 26-ish for the LR7 one.

As Bugs Bunny oft times said: "It just don't add up!"

Everything slowed down with LR 7, and I'm not the only one with this observation—this forum is filled with this complaint.

Just to pile on here, I have this problem as well and have been following this thread for months (maybe right after it started). My catalog is ~15,000 DNGs, so nowhere near the volume mentioned here, and when I import a shot (usually ~50 - 100 images), I have to click "import" and then go do something else for about 20 minutes while my computer churns through the process.

I'm anxiously awaiting resolution.

I'm here looking for a solution to the abnormally slow import I've been seeing for over a year now. Mac Mojave 6-core 8700K 64GB-RAM 1TB-NVME (the 3.5 GB/s gen 3 version). CPU is sitting at 200% for LR processes and I've seen 6 thumbnails come in after 20 minutes. 

Catalogs aren't backwards compatible. So you'd be back to where you were with your prior version catalog.

That is what I thought. So as to not lose work and still be able to process new photos, I am looking for a good alternative to LR

Deborah, I can totally feel your pain... I think that Capture One is a good candidate.

Alien skin Exposure 3 is also good

But who would want to break free from the Adobe CC total package just to pay for another software? We're already paying for one, now pay for two?

I've bought into ON1 Photo RAW and find it quite good. It's only two years old but the support is great, unlike Adobe who like to direct you to the FAQ or Forums pages rather than putting some one on your problem using Live chat.

Also, DxO plug-in has stopping importing back into LR since the latest LR update and the developers at DxO cant figure out why that's happening. ON1 plug-in works fine , though.

Agreed! Adobe is dropped the ball. Its quite obvious they care little for their customers.

No it does not. My computer is top end, my graphics card is top end and all of a sudden importing images has become a nightmare. Do I really need to find  a full day to import 400 Raw images and concert them???

Richard is right. The latest version is a basket case. Workflow crippled here too, like so many others. The only thing it has speeded up is nervous breakdowns.

7.2 is as horrible as the last version. I'd like a refund from Adobe until the product they charge us for actually works.

Update on my comment. I fixed all the issues by resetting the LR Preferences. It now flies along faster than ever. Worth a try. Astonishing that this isn't built in to the update process, given all the problems.

I'll try that too. I'll let you know if it works.

Mine was a fresh install, but it did find my old LR 3 catalog. Does that mean it had old LR settings?

Happy to know that Jeff. Thanks for the appreciation !

I'm not hearing widespread reports of this behavior. Might be a system specific. What troubleshooting steps have you tried?

I have exactly the same issue. Uploading from memory card used to be quick now it takes hours!!!

same here!

Same here. Extremely slow after upgrade. I am on Verions 7.2.

Adobe is obviously not interested in the pro market. I've waited for them to fix this mess they created. Its time to shop for something professional that can be relied upon.

In my case they actually contacted me per email to look into the issue. We found out that it is related to reading from the memory card. When first copying the photos to the hard disk and importing from there, the problem does not occur for me. Not ideal, but a viable workaround.