Lightroom is running quite slow at times on my system and I am wondering if my workflow is part of the problem. I have a 500MB catalog file and 25,000 images in the catalog. On some photos I do a ton of local edits. It is my understanding that this creates a lot of math instructions in the catalog on those images. Is that slowing things down in lightroom for me? Would I be better off doing those edits in photoshop and saving the file as a PSD? Would that speed things up some?
Posted 7 years ago
jdv, Champion
Steve
Other things to consider:
Do you use sidecars or dng files? Dng have many advantages, however sidecar files can be written faster.
I am editing tons of photos in Photoshop, and I find for my hardware it is much faster to save as uncompressed tiffs rather than psd files. (This is a time/space tradeoff).
If you are on Macintosh, my experience is that after editing tons of files you are best off rebooting, esp. if memory is limiting. Your mileage may vary.
Other things to consider:
Do you use sidecars or dng files? Dng have many advantages, however sidecar files can be written faster.
I am editing tons of photos in Photoshop, and I find for my hardware it is much faster to save as uncompressed tiffs rather than psd files. (This is a time/space tradeoff).
If you are on Macintosh, my experience is that after editing tons of files you are best off rebooting, esp. if memory is limiting. Your mileage may vary.
I definitely 2nd the notion of keeping eye on memory consumption when doing lots of painting and/or spot reduction (if computer/Lightroom becoming less responsive). They're notorious for "over-consumption"... - restarting Lightroom clears it.
Thanks for the feedback. I was able to increase performance by moving the camera raw cache back to the internal drive from the FireWire 800 external drive. I am running an iMac 4GB, 2.4 GHz core 2 duo. Sorry for the delay in responding but I was traveling. Thanks for othe prompt responses.
I'm surprised that made a noticeable difference, and suggest something other than sheer drive speed is responsible for the improvement.
jdv, Champion
This isn't about disk speed, necessarily. FW is an additional protocol and bus that has its own performance profile. What is odd is that, as far as I know, the raw cache isn't stressed for edits. It is populated when an image is opened in Develop, and from then on the cache is read only for that image.
We would expect random access reads to remain reasonably constant, but the drive might have gotten into a bad state. Or it was close to failing.
But the raw cache should be placed on a fast local partition anyway. It contains no precious information, so it can even be excepted from backups, or put on a RAID optimized for speed and not safety.
We would expect random access reads to remain reasonably constant, but the drive might have gotten into a bad state. Or it was close to failing.
But the raw cache should be placed on a fast local partition anyway. It contains no precious information, so it can even be excepted from backups, or put on a RAID optimized for speed and not safety.
