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LightRoom, first impressions - and problems..

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Bjørn K Nilssen

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Aug 15, 2016
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Hi - this is my first post here. I have been using AcDSee for many years, as well as Photoshop and many other programs for 20+ years.
As I now have a more powerful laptop, as well as CC photography subscription I found it was time to move over to LightRoom, as I now have two useable PCs.
I find that there are both pros and cons using LightRoom rather than AcDSee. There are advantages to LR not touching the original files, but then you always need to go through LR and export any files that you want to use. Not very useful in many situations - like for texture files, of which I have around 25000 files which I use mostly for texturing 3D models. Some of them are in formats which LR cannot read/view too, like .hdr and .exr 32-bit HDR images used for lighting 3D scenes. AcDSee keeps the originals too, but i stores a new version with all the developed adjustments, which can be used directly by other programs - while you still have all the originals.

After a few tests, and a lot of viewing LR tuts on youtube etc, I decided to put it all into one big Master catalog, on a 2TB external USB3 drive. It is actually faster than my internal drives, except for the SSD main drive - and it works like a charm swapping between the two PC's.
The catalog now contains around 60k images (and a few videos), in sizes from 16x16 icon to large 100Mpx+ panoramas etc. IMHO LR uses a very bad system for storing previews, where it looks like almost every single image file gets at least one folder + some files. Very inefficient, and takes ages to backup (if you want to). It was also probably the main reason why importing my main digital photos folder took almost 24 hours!!!
I will most likely remove all the textures, and access/view them from AcDSee, 3DBrowser or XNView.
I will probably also remove 12500+ circular fisheye images, and eventually keep them in a different catalog. Not really images I use a lot, as they were shot for creating spherical panoramas, often shot as HDR.

Problems
What does not work so well now is that LR gets very sluggish at times.
Sometimes it helps to Optimize catalog..., but sometimes it is lagging so much behind that I can't even get to access the menu. Nothing at all works, and I often have to kill LR to get rid of the problem.
I have 16GB RAM, running Win 10, and while LR sometimes uses 2-3GB of it, when this sluggishness happens the RAM usage is decreasing more and more, as LR gets more and more sluggish. It can get down to less than 50MB!!
What exactly is going on here?
Is this common knowledge (a program limitation)?
Or is it a bug (that the developers are not aware of)?
It is very annoying, anyway...
 
Welcome to the forum. Several versions of LRCC 2015.x came with some pretty nasty bugs. The latest release is LRCC2015.6.1. It is pretty stable and seems to be free of memory leaks that may be the cause of the slow downs that you see. Make sure you are running the latest release of LR and let us know if you are still experiencing sluggishness. Another cause for lack of performance is a virus scanner that is interceding between LR and the files that it needs to access. Be sure and exclude the folders containing your LR catalog and previews as well as folder containing your master images.

The reason that LR is required to create a derivative image is because all of the processing is maintained as instructions and stored in the LR catalog file. On Export, these instructions are merges with the original image data to produce a new image file. You do not need to take up disk storage with derivative image files as these can quickly be created and recreated when needed.
 
This leads to another problem I've had with LR. For some reason it refused to update LR on my laptop, while PS would upgrade without a problem. I actually had to contact support (chat), and after a long and solutionless session where he remote-controlled my PC, he finally tolld me to try to use a different network. And that finally solved the problem - using my mobile set up as a Wi-FI hotspot. I have no idea what Creative Cloud is doing different when updating LR vs PS, as PS (and other apps) never had any problems. It may have been because I interrupted/cancelled an upgrade that started while it was on the mobile wi-fi connect. As I have only 1GB/month quota I wanted to wait until I got back home on my regular Wi-Fi. By this time LR updated just fine on my PC, but now, a few days ago, it started having the same problem, and refused to update LR because it couldn't connect to Adobe servers. No error codes/numbers, and just told me to check firewell and time settings... As I didn't have any Wi-Fi on my PC (using Ethernet cable to router) I couldn't switch connection. After days struggling with this I went out and bought a new USB/Wi-Fi "card"/dongle . This time I connected my phone to the Wi-Fi router and my PC to the mobile hotspot via Wi-Fi, and this time it worked!! The phone did not use any mobile data, but just appeared as a connector between the PC and the braodband router.
Very strange - and I really wish Adobe would offer a straight downloadable update file instead of that cryptic Creative Cloud panel!

So far I have not encountered that sluggishness problem yet with LR 2015.6.1, but then I haven't given it any heavy metadata to work on yet...
I will be off for a few days now, using only my laptop, so I hope the sluggishness is gone there too. It only has 8GB RAM.
 
And if you uninstall LR and the full CC package, and then reinstall, it doesn't install the newest version, but the first 2015 versions :-(
And then you have to update those apps again from the CC panel, which in my case still didn't wotk with LR - until I switched temporarily to a "new" connection.
 
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