5 Tips to Speed Up Lightroom

Here are 5 quick things that may help speed up Lightroom and make sure you're squeezing every bit of performance out of it that you can.

[jason]

I was seriously fantasizing about smashing my computer a few minutes ago until I got to about the 5 minute mark in the video. I paused it, tried it, and Life saver. I was loosing my mind Lightroom was glitching bad! I changed that setting and its instantly better. My whole computer is better now I swear hahaha. Thank you!!!

[magistique]

I am using an Imac 5K with 32gb of RAM, i had to wait for 3-4 sec to have a sharp image on my screen, as soon as i turned off the "use graphic processor" it solved the problem. Thanks for the tips

[LoboOutdoor]

Just bought a new laptop and Lightroom was super laggy. UNTIL I turned OFF the use graphics processor option. Way faster now thanks!!

[pitushing]

This is the most useful video I've come across. Everything you have talked about in this video worked and now LR is functioning smoothly. Thank you so much!

[SpotBentley]

Changed my C drive from a 128Gb SSD to a 1T SSD today. Both Adobe programs and catalogue will be on it so I'm expecting big improvement in speed.

[kentwingerak]

Hi Matt. Once again, an incredibly informative video. 2 Questions for you. 1 - if I didn't hit the embedded and sidecar option on import, I would imagine that there is no way I can have these created with files already existing in my library since these embedded files would likely be discarded. Is there a second best alternative to speed up the workflow for images that are already in my library where this option was not used (i.e. discarding full size previews, etc.)? At one point I had thought that having 1:1 previews would speed up the workflow all of the heavy lifting would be done at import and if I had to later zoom in to check focus, etc. then I would already be working with full size previews. However, I can now see how this will seriously affect the ability to quickly scan through a whack of images. 2 - I am using a Nikon D800. As you know, that is a high resolution camera (long in the tooth and shortly replacing) and my understanding is that if the embedded previews are less than 50% of the file size, LR will look for a sidecar file. However, since I don't want to be capturing both RAW and JPEG and duplicating photos, my hope is that the embedded previews in the D800 are full size. Of course I couldn't' find any literature on this. Do you feel a camera from 2012 would likely not have full size embedded previews??? Thanks in advance.

[frederichore]

Superb! I've been subscribed for a while - really enjoy your casual, easygoing style, and of course excellent tutorials.
Cheers from Montréal.

[musicmachineplayer]

Some great simple tips - please keep them coming

[adarajennifer]

Very helpful; thank you. What is the maximum number of photos you would recommend having in one LR catalog before opening a new LR catalog?

[rachelg]

Matt, about cache size you mentioned having enough disk space...just so I'm clear, is that hard drive space or RAM? I got confused because you mentioned having lots of apps open, which makes me think of RAM. I get confused. Sorry for the basic question.

[marcrjacobs]

Hi Matt; Great tips, thanks! I've imported nearly 60, 000 photos over the years and never had embedded preview on during import. How to I add the embedded previews now to the existing photos? Thanks, Marc

[kirstyhepworth]

how do you speed up Lightroom classic syncing your images?

[karstengieselmann]

Very good summary, Matt! I am missing one tip though, which IMO has becoming more important with the slow down of LR 7.x versions - and that is restarting LR after every 30-60 mins of work. Even though my PC has 32 GB and there is now disk swapping at all, after some time the LR UI becomes really laggy. I assume this has to do with growing memory, and suboptimal memory management. In fact, I find this issue quite annoying and it's new in LR7. Restarting LR will cure this.

[Darthbishop]

Hey Matt, great tips. What do you think about editing with "Smart Previews"? It's an option found under the "Performance" tab.

[RealHankShill]

Matt, the option to automatically write changes to XMP. You misunderstand it a little. Without that XMP file, even lightroom will not know your edits and changes if you do not have the original catalog. I.E. your edits are stored in the catalog. If you take just the raw file, and import it into another lightroom catalog, you will have to edit it all over again. So as long as you always have your original catalog, then you will have your edits.

If you write the edits to XMP, then Lightroom will be able to automatically generate your edits based off this sidecar file that is stored next to your original RAW file.

So, for instance. Say you archive your files from this year. 15 years from now for some reason you want one. If you dont have that original catalog anymore, you will have to completely re-edit your files, as all you will have is RAW data. If you wrote to XMP, then you will have all those edits saved.

If you convert to DNG on import, all of this doesnt matter because your edits are not stored in a sidecar file, they are embedded in the actual DNG file, so you will always have those edits even in different catalogs.

[kentwingerak]

One final question - and this I see bantered about on all the forums. Will the size of a catalog affect LR performance? Mine is at about 120, 000 images. Is there a limit on the catalog size where this will slow down LR's performance? Thank you in advance.

[souviksamanta]

Tips to Speed Up for Luminar and LRtimelaps

[stef]

Turning off the graphics card just made it extremely slow. Idk why you would ever want to do that? My laptop is quite old. I already had everything fine tuned except for not optimizing my catalog. I suppose my pc just is slow and there is nothing i can do

[You-Tuber]

Thanks for the tips. Notice I don't get much lag now even on my iMac

[rickoleary]

Hey Matt, thanks so much. Excellent tips. Sounds like you recommend keeping your LR catalog on your local SSD drive. Does it matter if I keep my RAW files when editing on the local SSD or external SSD drive? I am using USB 3.0.