Shadow

[stevemoorevale]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic version: 8.4

Operating System

1. Windows 10

Hi.

This may be a unique problem but i thought it would be worth asking on here.
Sometimes when i am doing very normal things like selecting one or more photos in grid view or grouping images into a stack, the program will freeze for a moment and i get the windows spinning wheel. Then Lightroom will disappear from screen momentarily before returning a second or two later and then do what i asked it to do in the first place. Every time this happens i get a thing called Shadow come up (sometimes twice) on my task bar. As soon as these disappear everything kicks back into action. Has anybody had any experience of this? I have tried turning off Graphics Acceleration.

For those that may ask i run the following.
AMD Ryzen 2700X 8 core processor
16gb DDR4 dual channel RAM
Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics card
Catalog running off a Samsung EVO SSD with plenty of spare room. Large cache sizes set.

 

[Hal P Anderson]

There's a gaming app called Shadow. It appears to allow you to connect to a powerful virtual gaming PC from any of your devices.
https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/partners/shadow-cloud-gaming-services.html
Is there any chance that you're running it on your PC?

Even if that's not what's causing your problem, I'd bet that some app you're running is the cause.

 

[Califdan]

Hal,
I get this too from time to time and have never installed a game. I'm pretty sure this is an adobe LR "shadow" (is background or parallel) process but not sure what. It seems too happen most after long LR sessions that have accessed many images. Shutting LR down and re launching clears issue for some amount of time.

 

[stevemoorevale]

Thank you both for your replies. I didn't know about the game thing and very interestingly if i do a windows search for shadow the first result that comes up is an application called GeForce Experience which is a gaming orientated program by Nvidia who makes my graphics card. I found this after a google search too.

'Now you can record and share gameplay videos and livestreams on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook. NVIDIA ShadowPlay™ technology lets you broadcast with minimal performance overhead, so you never miss a beat in your games. The GeForce Experience in-game overlay makes it fast and easy.'

I would also agree that Lr suffers badly after long sessions but i have had this shadow problem after short ones too. I am going to see if i can get rid of GeForce experience without losing my garphics card drivers and then see what happens over the next few days. Thanks again for your replies

 

[Conrad Chavez]

'Now you can record and share gameplay videos and livestreams on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook. NVIDIA ShadowPlay™ technology lets you broadcast with minimal performance overhead, so you never miss a beat in your games. The GeForce Experience in-game overlay makes it fast and easy.'

Based on that description, if Shadow is a screen recorder/live video streamer for gamers, then it's going to provide some kind of instant way to engage it, like a keyboard shortcut. It's possible that while you're working in Lightroom, something you do matches the action that starts up the Shadow application, like pressing a key combination. When you find where the Shadow software lives on your computer, find out what its shortcut is for starting/stopping screen recording or live streaming, because there's a strong possibility that one of those matches a shortcut in Lightroom.

After you delete the software or at least reassign its recording shortcut to not conflict with Lightroom, there is one more thing you might want to do. Because the conflicting software can record video, you may have unintentionally recorded video of your screen that's now taking up space somewhere on your computer. Find out where Shadow stores its recordings, so you can see if there are any large video files in there that you'd want to delete.

 

[stevemoorevale]

Thanks. I've found all the settings and shortcuts. I don't see any shortcuts that match what i frequently use in Lightroom. However, i have found a toggle switch for 'In-Game Overlay' which controls all the recording and streaming. It is now off. I've also located the recording directory and there is nothing new in there. Just a couple of videos from when i did play a game many, many months ago.

 

[Califdan]

Just for clarity, In the programming world (at least when I was in the game a hundred years ago), the term "shadow process" was a generic way to describe either a parallel process such as taking a large problem and dividing it up among different processors to get the job done faster. Another use of the term was in high impact or critical situations running the same thing on separate processors (or even separate computers) and verifying that the results are the same. So, I would expect Googling "Shadow Process" or similar to deliver many irrelevant results as any programmer writing such a parallel activity could logically call it "Shadow" or use that label on the task bar icon.

Personally it seems like an Adobe LR thing to me as it has only showed up on my computer when running LR. It could be something as simple as the process to write XMP data in the background (if you have that option turned on) and the icon only shows up if the process hangs around too long such as might be expected if something like a backup system put a temp lock on an XMP file that took longer than expected to complete just before LR tried to update the file. This could happen, for example a cloud back up utility such as Carbonite or Crash Plan is having communication problems or the XMP data is inside a large DNG that may take a minute or two to get copied to the cloud.

Anyway, all speculation on my part. If the problem is repeatable on demand, try turning off all your backup tools, including time machine, and see if problem persists. If so, turn off GPU card in LR and see what happens.