# Help! LR questions...



## MLeeK (Feb 23, 2012)

I am trying to make myself love Lightroom4 because of the new tools in it that I want to play with. I still have my LR issues, but...
So, how the hell do I speed it up? Its going to take me forever waiting for LR to update the image I am working on. 
I am pretty sure it's not the computer. I have a 64 bit. 3G, dual core athlon processor running 6G ram. The hard drive is essentially empty of anything other than the programs on it. I have 300G of memory open on a 463G hard drive.
What is my problem??? Help??? I don't have this problem at all in ACR!!!


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## GeorgieGirl (Feb 23, 2012)

What about in lr3...did you have this issue?


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## SCraig (Feb 23, 2012)

I've barely used LR so I don't know if this will help, or if it's even possible, but try completely disabling the cache.  With 6gb of memory you shouldn't need a cache unless you are editing some enormous files or unless LR is really a memory hog.  I can easily edit 16 megapixel files in Capture NX2 with 6gb of memory and the cache disabled.


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## MLeeK (Feb 23, 2012)

I never use LR, so I don't know! I think so? Maybe? I am an ACR kinda girl!


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## SCraig (Feb 23, 2012)

You're closer than me, I don't even use anything made by Adobe except Acrobat.

My computer has enough memory to process everything I do with images completely in memory so I normally disable caches.  I don't know if it helps but so far it hasn't hurt anything.  My philosophy is that since physical memory (RAM) is on the order of 500,000 times faster than virtual memory (disk memory) the more processing I can keep in physical memory the better.


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## MLeeK (Feb 23, 2012)

SCraig said:


> You're closer than me, I don't even use anything made by Adobe except Acrobat.
> 
> My computer has enough memory to process everything I do with images completely in memory so I normally disable caches.  I don't know if it helps but so far it hasn't hurt anything.  My philosophy is that since physical memory (RAM) is on the order of 500,000 times faster than virtual memory (disk memory) the more processing I can keep in physical memory the better.


You TOTALLY confused me there. Lightroom is made by Adobe???
you said you disable the cache... One of the recommendations I find everywhere is to ENLARGE the cache to speed up? I am SOOO confused!

See, I knew there was a more than one reason I really didn't care for LR. I am going to go bald trying to figure this out!!!


I almost feel like it's keeping all of the filmstrip in the ram? does that make sense?


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## Josh66 (Feb 23, 2012)

Can you change the swap rate on Windows?  On Linux, it's usually called 'swappiness', or something like that.  It controls how often information gets written to swap memory (cache).  With the right settings, most programs will never write anything to swap unless the RAM is just completely full.

Also, how much swap space do you have?  It's usually recommended that you have double the RAM, but if you have a lot of RAM that's probably overkill.  You do need (want) it to be at least equal to the RAM though.

edit
The reason you want double the RAM is that so if the swap and RAM are both full, it can write the RAM to the swap to free up the RAM.  If you have enough RAM that it never gets full, you don't really need double that on swap.


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## SCraig (Feb 23, 2012)

MLeeK said:


> You TOTALLY confused me there. Lightroom is made by Adobe???
> you said you disable the cache... One of the recommendations I find everywhere is to ENLARGE the cache to speed up? I am SOOO confused!
> 
> See, I knew there was a more than one reason I really didn't care for LR. I am going to go bald trying to figure this out!!!
> ...


Uh, yeah, Lightroom is made by Adobe as far as I know.

The cache is on your hard disk.  Average hard disk access time is about 7.5 milliseconds (1/1000 second) unless you have a solid state disk drive.  Average RAM access time is about 150 nanoseconds (1/1,000,000,000 second).  Any time you can force the software to keep everything in memory without caching it to disk things are going to run faster.  The down side is that you may run into issues with the software running out of memory.  With 6gb that shouldn't be a problem.  I have 6gb on this machine and have never had any issues with image processing software running out of memory.



O|||||||O said:


> Can you change the swap rate on Windows?  On  Linux, it's usually called 'swappiness', or something like that.  It  controls how often information gets written to swap memory (cache).   With the right settings, most programs will never write anything to swap  unless the RAM is just completely full.
> 
> Also, how much swap space do you have?  It's usually recommended that  you have double the RAM, but if you have a lot of RAM that's probably  overkill.  You do need (want) it to be at least equal to the RAM though.
> 
> ...


The swap rate in Windows can be tuned up to a point, I think.  There aren't any user controls to do it though and to be honest I've never tried.  There are some system registry settings that control the swap rate and threshold but they have to be edited manually.  There is probably some aftermarket software that will do it though.  They can be easily MONITORED but the standard Windows utility used to monitor the system performance doesn't have any controls to change the settings.

Windows creates the swap file when the system boots.  The size of the swap file can be controlled through a GUI setting, and it is by default twice the RAM size.  If the RAM changes it will change the size of the swap file the next time the system boots.


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## gerardo2068 (Feb 23, 2012)

Well LR 4 still beta. That may affect something. I use a LR in my Desktop and laptop and is super fast. LR is good I like many of the features. 

Like anything else it's not for everyone I guess

I like the database


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## MLeeK (Feb 23, 2012)

You guys would have a HEART ATTACK at how slow this is moving. It's taken me the better part of an hour to export to jpeg about 75 images. Before that it took me probably 2 hours to adjust them. And the only actual adjustment I had to do beyond applying a preset I made was to double check white balance because of cycling lights! 75 images should take me about a half hour or less!!!


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## 2WheelPhoto (Feb 23, 2012)

There has got to be a setting wrong somewhere, thats insane slow.


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## 2WheelPhoto (Feb 23, 2012)

Is the computer due a disk defrag?  A friend's LR slowed to a crawl and that was the fix


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## EIngerson (Feb 23, 2012)

MLeeK said:


> You guys would have a HEART ATTACK at how slow this is moving. It's taken me the better part of an hour to export to jpeg about 75 images. Before that it took me probably 2 hours to adjust them. And the only actual adjustment I had to do beyond applying a preset I made was to double check white balance because of cycling lights! 75 images should take me about a half hour or less!!!



If that's the case I'd uninstall it and reinstall it.  

But before that, check and see if your security program is scanning each operation because it's a download. My AVG free did that to a couple programs.


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## MLeeK (Feb 24, 2012)

I am not running virus program. My processing computer isn't on line and is only really used for processing. BUT I wonder if its maybe windows defender? I will have to look when I get home.


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## Helen B (Feb 24, 2012)

Is there some confusion here between the virtual memory cache and the LR cache? The LR cache is in a permanent directory on the hard drive (including a virtual hard drive filled from permanent storage every time the computer starts if you have one, or solid state hard drive), not in virtual memory on the hard drive. It is where LR stores previews of images in the catalog. If the LR cache is too small, old previews will be deleted and have to be remade next time the image is loaded. If the cache is set to zero, no previews are held in the LR cache, because there is no LR cache. It isn't a choice between virtual memory and physical memory.


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## MReid (Feb 24, 2012)

I have the same problem with Lightroom 3. I am glad I didn't delete Lightroom 2.7, it is turbo fast.
Lightroom 3 takes foorreeevver. I only use it now for auto sync noise reduction or lens correction, I plug it in and let it run when I have lots of time.


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## gerardo2068 (Feb 24, 2012)

There's has to be a problem with some of your computers or something. I just export  234 jpegs last night and it didn't even take 15 minutes. 

So for me LR3 it's fast


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## MReid (Feb 24, 2012)

For me the killer is when I select a photo in to edit it in the develop module.....takes for ever to render the photo so I can see it.
I checked and as far as I can tell the settings are the same for 3 as they are in 2.7 which renders the photo to be edited almost instantly.


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## gerardo2068 (Feb 24, 2012)

Really I don't understand. Mine it's super fast in both of my computer.

Try unistalling all you can find and reinstall


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## MLeeK (Feb 24, 2012)

Mine is the rendering after applying a change that is SUPER slow. I am "ghetto" rigging it for now. I do almost everything in ACR-set my wb and everything. Then I am importing to LR with the wb done and just applying the preset. 
The export took forever last night... I just did another 50 images we'll see how this goes now. 

I did disable windows defender's real time scan to see if that helped and upped the Cache to 3G. I'll let you know. 

SCraig-you REALLY confused me when you said you don't use any Adobe products except for Acrobat... but in the post before you were talking about some limited use of LR... Totally didn't fit in my brain.


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## MLeeK (Feb 24, 2012)

Didn't help.


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## SCraig (Feb 24, 2012)

MLeeK said:


> ... SCraig-you REALLY confused me when you said you don't use any Adobe products except for Acrobat... but in the post before you were talking about some limited use of LR... Totally didn't fit in my brain.


Sorry, you are right and I didn't realize that.

True that I don't use Adobe software much.  I don't particularly have anything against Adobe, so I decided I'd download the demo of Lightroom and look at it a couple of months ago.  I played with it for a little while, really only long enough to see that I didn't need another image catalog database.  I didn't spend enough time with it to really even explore all of its capabilities since it was plain to me that what I already had worked better.  Certainly less than an hour, probably less than 30 minutes.  Hence my comment about "Limited use".

I apologize for the confusion.  My mistake entirely.


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## GeorgieGirl (Feb 24, 2012)

MLeeK said:


> You guys would have a HEART ATTACK at how slow this is moving. It's taken me the better part of an hour to export to jpeg about 75 images. Before that it took me probably 2 hours to adjust them. And the only actual adjustment I had to do beyond applying a preset I made was to double check white balance because of cycling lights! 75 images should take me about a half hour or less!!!



You know what....if the files have lots of noise, even though you can't see it, they are big and heavy and the noise needs to be turned down...how big are your jpeg files?


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## Rephargotohp (Feb 24, 2012)

Leeky,
Is today the first you are using Lightroom and did you Import your entire computer's Photo files or alarge amount into it just today?

If that's so most of LR power is going to rendering Thumbnails, Sccreen res previews and 100% previews if you have the software set to do that on import.

That can take quite a while to get done if you have imported a huge amount of fiiles, You can usually see a progress bar in the upper left hand side if it is still rendering previews.

Until that is done, LR runs like mollases

Justa thought


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## MLeeK (Feb 24, 2012)

Yes, first real use last night. No, I only imported the one game I was working on. Somewhere under 200 raw images from my 1d3


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## robolepa (Feb 24, 2012)

Try optimizing your catalog.  Click on "File", and select "optimize".  It should always be the first thing you do when LR is running slow.


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## JG_Coleman (Feb 24, 2012)

MLeeK said:


> I am trying to make myself love Lightroom4 because of the new tools in it that I want to play with.



Lightroom 4 is just a beta-test release right now.  Speed enhancements are pretty much the last step in the process towards a finished product.  The purpose of the beta is essentially to demo new features/enhancements and get feedback before the final version is released.  

It is *not* intended for production use or high-volume processing in its current state.

This issue was also brought up on Adobe's LR4b forums.  Some people complained," How am I supposed to know if I can use LR4 for my work if it's so slow?"

The fact of the matter is that LR4b is *only *a demonstration of the new features, not refined and finished product.  It is not meant to be used as a "trial version" of the software for us to decide if we want the full version.  The beta is a pre-release of a program that is still being developed.  If you're interested in how fast it will be when it's actually released, you'll have to wait until it's actually released and then download the trial version that Adobe offers (it has offered limited-time trials for other versions of LR, I presume they'll do the same for LR4).  But, in it's current beta state, the program is not optimized for speed.  The ONLY reason that we have even been able to see this program yet is to demo the new features and offer feedback, not to put it through the paces with heavy-duty, high-volume processing.


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## MLeeK (Feb 24, 2012)

We aren't talking high volume here. We're talking it's impossible to process ONE image with. I didn't do a full tournament or anything on purpose. _*I*_ am not ready for that as I am *NOT* a LR lover (to say the least.) This is insane. You can't do jack with the new settings to see how good or bad they are going to be if it is running THIS slow. 
If I adjust a slider it does NOT react... then goes to Not responding for a good 10 seconds and then all of a sudden wakes up and does whatever I have adjusted. At which point I start the process all over again until I finally hit the right WB. And the sliders? totally unuseable .I HAVE to enter in a numeric value or I could be trying to bump the blacks by 1 or 2 and get 135 by using the slider. 
This isn't an "optimizing for speed" issue. This is a totally unuseable issue and I can't believe that Adobe is even putting out a beta that does this crap. I know it's something on my computer going on. This is FAR beyond slow. 
I even went so far as to export the images I finished last night, then totally remove them from the catalog to leave me with less images in the catalog. If LR4 beta can't handle 200 raw images in a catalog I can't imagine it handling a few thousand even after it's been optimized. 
Something is not right here.


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## GeorgieGirl (Feb 24, 2012)

I am not having this issue with a photo as a single with LR4. I agree somehting is not right. I don't know what it is but I am sure this is not what they intended. The last time I had an issue that sounded like this was with Elements, and I got a new computer with this that and the other (the one I have now) and I had no issues ever again...


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## Rephargotohp (Feb 24, 2012)

I found the answer
"Lightroom blows monkey balls"

Hahahah..seriously worst program ever and I used it all the way back to when it was Raw Shooter before Adobe bought it and monkey'd it up. At the time it was the best RAW program without a doubt

I only have it because a lot of the programs I review are plug-ins for Lightroom

I like a couple things, otherwise...it's annoying. But I am by far in the minority...and that's OK


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## MLeeK (Feb 24, 2012)

Rephargotohp said:


> I found the answer
> "Lightroom blows monkey balls"
> 
> Hahahah..seriously worst program ever and I used it all the way back to when it was Raw Shooter before Adobe bought it and monkey'd it up. At the time it was the best RAW program without a doubt
> ...



I am a LR hater too. I just really wanted to play with the new tools that will be coming in the next ACR and see if it's all that with a side of special-ness. Evidently I will just wait until CS6. I knew I hated LR for a reason!


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## Rephargotohp (Feb 24, 2012)

I'll be serious ...for a moment, Try updating the driver for your video card. a lot of slow issues in LR and CS 5 even have been traced to video card drivers especially nVidea cards


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## MLeeK (Feb 24, 2012)

That's about the only thing I haven't tried. 
I have uninstalled & reinstalled
disabled windows defender
Torn some hair out
made sure NOTHING else is running
disk clean up
disk defrag
health check
check disk
thrown things at the wall
disabled the cache
expanded the cache
Re-installed
turned the preview quality down
added a 16G jump drive to be used as ram
Torn more hair out, screamed bloody murder and turned into a raving b1tch. 
Just about given up. But I just can't let it go!!! SOMETHING is going to click into place and BAM it's going to work-at least at a normal slow rate!


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## GeorgieGirl (Feb 24, 2012)

You need a Mac...


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## MLeeK (Feb 24, 2012)

GeorgieGirl said:


> You need a Mac...


I REALLY do!!!!!
It needs to be a bulletproof Mac too. 
I do have a macbook here somewhere... Of course it's probably an antique now. I think it's a G4? yeah, stone aged. 
Someone want to tell my husband that I HAVE to spend a couple grand on a new computer system, plus calibration... OH and don't forget Mac copies of all of my software... That's almost as daunting as switching to nikon.


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## Overread (Feb 24, 2012)

Isn't Lightroom 4 still in beta testing? Maybe it would be better to test for performance with Lightroom 3 and then get the 4th version demo when it official comes out (granted it should be fairly bug free by now, but you never know you might be one of the unlucky with an - as yet - unfixed problem).

If it still is in beta sending details to Adobe might well help .


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## MLeeK (Feb 24, 2012)

Eh. Not worth the headache. I just wanted to play with the new toys. I have the LR3 disc here somewhere. I could install it. I just don't care for LR. It's just the new highlight and shadow tools I wanted to play with. 
I'll live.


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## cepwin (Feb 24, 2012)

Interesting discussion.   I haven't had any major issues with LR4...I actually like it quite a bit.  But as a number of people have said it is beta which means not entirely done and optimization is a final step.  I think Overread is right...it's probably not worth your time trying to work this issue any more until the demo is available.  If you decide to try the demo reinstall it clean...after you uninstall the beta make sure all the cache files, etc. are gone (you could have something corrupted.)  I have another thought...perhaps since it's not connected to the internet something is timing out.  Unlikely since it's slow on rendering, etc. not an operation that you'd think care about the network but I've seen surprising network dependencies.  Oh,one other thing I noticed...there are setting in both the catalog settings and preferences for preview quality...mine are set to medium..perhaps they got set to high?


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## gerardo2068 (Feb 24, 2012)

I guess is preference, I don't like the endless clicking through folders in Bridge, or the layout in collections. virtual copies and others


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## GeorgieGirl (Feb 24, 2012)

There is no Bridge in LR....? That's why I quit Elements....


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## gerardo2068 (Feb 24, 2012)

GeorgieGirl said:
			
		

> There is no Bridge in LR....? That's why I quit Elements....



No, there's something better. Lol


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## GeorgieGirl (Feb 24, 2012)

I don't use Bridge at all in LR3...dunno about you....and yes...no Bridge is better IMHO....

edit: Does LR really even have Bridge???


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## MTVision (Feb 24, 2012)

gerardo2068 said:
			
		

> I guess is preference, I don't like the endless clicking through folders in Bridge, or the layout in collections. virtual copies and others



You don't actually have to click through a bunch of folders - you can set it up so that when you open a folder (with multiple folders inside) it will just show you all the pictures. That's what I hated about bridge in the beginning - having to click through a bunch of folders. But there is a way around it.


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## MLeeK (Feb 25, 2012)

You can change bridge to work and look any way you want it to-and I have. I MUCH prefer bridge and ACR to Lightroom. As I was TRYING to use LR4 I ran into my same old problem as I did in the past-colorspace and things looking significantly different in LR than what I would get out of ACR/PS when using sRGB. I ended up with some VERY cool images because I'd get to LR and see that what I had adjusted in ACR looked very warm/magenta... fix it... Then process for print and sports and low and behold it was cool. I HATE being forced to work in that ProPhoto colorspace. Among other things in LR.


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## gerardo2068 (Feb 25, 2012)

Never had a problem with prophoto


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## GeorgieGirl (Feb 25, 2012)

For print I convert in CS5 for sRGB....talk about a slow upload??? LR3 to CS5...Think Final Jeopardy music.


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## gerardo2068 (Feb 25, 2012)

I don't know what computer you have but I have pretty much zero delay on my iMac 2011


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## GeorgieGirl (Feb 25, 2012)

...well, then....I guess I'll just have to go an get one of those.


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## gerardo2068 (Feb 25, 2012)

if you can, ask for SSD drive installed.... super fast


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