September 4, 2007

Five Ways to Speed Up Lightroom. “Check to see that you have at least 50% of your hard drive space on your computer available. If you are working with a hard drive that is more than 75% full (i.e. you only have 25-25% of your hard drive memory left) that can slow down all applications and especially Lightroom.” That seems like a lot. I try to keep 10gb spare on my 80gb drive. Isn’t that enough? via Steve Gerrard

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4 Comments on “Five Ways to Speed Up Lightroom”

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  1. 1 ian
    Sep 4th, 2007 at 1:54 pm

    I suspect that it’s a question of fragmentation, and contiguous space. A full hard drive is more likely to be fragmented, and to lack large expanses of contiguous disk space, which would slow down the application. He’s not saying that 10Gb is or isn’t enough, but that it’ll be quicker on an emptier disk.

  2. 2 Ken Davidson
    Sep 4th, 2007 at 3:14 pm

    But that’s true of any large-file intensive programme not just Lightroom, and yet Lightroom seems to be one of the most sluggish apps that I’ve tried to use. And I’ve got 75% of a 250gb hard drive spare, on top of my main drive with 50% of 160gb spare – both defragged regularly.

    Mainly I use apps in the Adobe CS2 suite and things fly relatively quickly. I tried to upgrade to CS3 recently, and my PC slowed to a crawl. Went back to CS2 and all was fine.

    There’s plenty of comment on the web about how slow Lightroom operates, and as it seems to be a contemporary of CS3 then I’m beginning to suspect Adobe have crapped out bigtime on some of the coding.

    Until I can afford a better PC I’m sticking with a combo of CS2, Google’s Picasa and Canon’s stock RAW handler.

  3. 3 Pete Ashton
    Sep 4th, 2007 at 4:10 pm

    You should try using it on a 733mhz G4. Now that’s sluggish but at least it ran, but I was happy to use it for 6 months or so.

    No answers from me but I do think Lightroom is doing a hell of a lot of work.

  4. 4 focalplane
    Sep 5th, 2007 at 9:26 am

    Well, there was a great improvement between LR 1.0 and 1.1 and most of this seems to have addressed the problem. It’s true that huge temporary files accumulate during a single run of the program. These can be erased manually at any time if space is a problem. I have 80GB on my PowerBook and have gone down to 2 GB with no real speed difference over having 20GB. Your experience may be different, of course.

    Incidentally, I now have the Lightroom files on a separate LaCie portable drive (ditto iTunes) and this allows me to have more space on the internal drive and this is where LR keeps its scratch files.

    As to Lightroom’s code, it is worth considering that this piece of software had a lot of input from end users so the code could well be on the sluggish side until Adobe is able to streamline things more than for 1.1

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