The great Lightroom CC experiment

Well, here we are about a month and a half into the Lightroom upgrade to CC and to sum up the experience, I guess I vacillate between two words, "eh" and "arg."

Overall, everything was working fine. I tried out the new features and LR seemed a little bit faster. But, that changed about a week ago.

As is normally the case, I was working on a large project and LR essentially came to a stop. It wasn't hung, but it was at near glacial speeds. I was changing photographs, the full size image came up on my 2nd monitor with the little "Loading" message at the bottom of the photo. Instead of the animation spinning for a moment, it was just sitting there.  No matter what I clicked on, nothing happened.

Like most would do, I went to Task Manager to kill off the app. But, I noticed it didn't have a not responding message. I also noticed that LR was using about 50% of my processor (8 core i7). Normally, it is somewhat lower than that unless I'm exporting a large set of photos.

I don't know why I noticed it, but after doing a little digging around I noticed that the little spinning icon next to the loading message had moved just a little bit. So, LR wasn't hung. It was just moving at a glacial pace.

I decided to kill off the app after about 20 minutes. After I closed it, I checked to insure I had plenty of disk space and I had previously checked that I had no memory or pagefile issues.

I restarted LR and, thinking it was just a fluke or bad joo joo, continued editing my project. Within about 10 minutes the same thing happened again. To cut to the chase, I optimized my catalog, deleted my preview cached, increased the cache size in Settings, and turned off the "Use GPU" option. I still have the same symptom.

I've been scanning the forums to see if anyone else has run into this. So far, no luck. I'm contemplating removing LR and re-installing. But, before I get that drastic, I'm going to do a little more digging.  I can still use my desktop[ for short duration work it seems. My laptop is not exhibiting the issue. I can always do things there and migrate catalogs later. 

More details as I get them...

I'm back... Lightroom 6 rumors...

Hello everyone.... A sad loss in the family has been keeping me busy as well as drained the batteries some. But, I'm back, with camera and computer in tow, and getting back into the swing of things.

 

To kick off 2015, I start with a recent post about Lightroom 6. If true, we'll get a performance boost as well as some new features. To learn more, check out this PetaPixel article.





Tech Tip - Improving Lightroom Import Speed

After a discussion with a few photographers this weekend, I thought I would re-share this tech tip in case others were not aware of the work around.

When you import photo's into Lightroom (5.4 and below) from a card reader, the process is painfully slow. It seems to take nearly twice as long than if you copy the files from the card directly to your desktop.

As a work around, you should do just that. Either copy the files to your desktop or the location of your library. Then, in Lightroom, import them and use either the Move or Add command.

You will find this process a lot faster than if you were to import them from the card within Lightroom.

I talked to a few people from Adobe at the last Photoshop World and they were familiar with the issue. But, they did not know why it happened or if it was going to be addressed. In the mean time, use this workaround to save a little time.