Are smart previews meant to speed things up - how?

[A_S]

Tearing my hair out again with the performance of lightroom.

What on earth is the purpose of smart profiles?

I am going through a folder trying to cull images quickly. I had previously created smart previews to allow me to flick through quickly and colour code each photo.....

However

A.) The smart previews seem to be created without the exposure adjustments (applied on import...)

B.) this means every time i flick to a new photo lightroom has to "expose it" and this takes 10-20 seconds

C.) each photo sits on "loading" with a blury image for 5 or 10 seconds before the above even starts to happen....

Its slow AF to be honest and my machine isnt sluggish. Both catelogue and photos hosted on a local SSD, 24gb of ram (ALL, yes F-ing all eaten up by lightroom despite regular restarts) and a 2.6ghz I7 - not sure the "effective speed" as task manager tells me its running faster than that (and its a laptop so not overclocked).

 

[Dave Canon]

What size are your smart previews. I think the idea is to set them to roughly the size of your screen so they can be presented immediately.

Dave

 

[A_S]

Thanks - I think i have them set to low and 1080p -> but the problem is they are not exposed as per my develop adjustments which means i have to sit through the dreaded "loading" as they apply those adjustments each time

 

[juggler]

Smart previews are intended so let you edit images in LR while the raw files are (temporarily) somewhere else, e.g. a disconnected HDD. Otherwise they serve little purpose.

FWIW there's nothing wrong with using all the RAM, that's a good thing.

 

[JohnStewart]

I found the quickest way to import photos and then go through them for culling was to increase the LR cache to about 30Gb (Edit, Preferences, Performance) build 1:1 previews on import. Don't apply noise reduction or CA correction on import as this just slows things down and it's wasting time doing this to a lot of images that may eventually get culled. Once the 1:1 previews are built, you can then go through them very quickly using the left/right arrows using the Library module/tab. It's noticeably slower using the develop module.

 

[juggler]

I highly recommend https://www.fastrawviewer.com/ for culling. Saves me hours. You do need to make the time to learn how to use the keyboard shortcuts and how best to integrate with LR but it's worth the effort.

 

[Dave Canon]

I still think the OP has set something wrong. I do use standard smart previews and use LR for selecting, rating and culling and it is very fast. My catalogue points to over 30,000 Raw images but when viewing this catalogue and the most recent 106 images the maximum Ram used is 1.5Gb (I have 32Gb).

Dave

 

[Craikeybaby]

There are "previews" (used in the library module) and "smart previews" (used as surrogates for original files when they are not available and can be used in the develop module).

If you want to flick through many images quickly you are best off using the embedded preview from the raw file - you will not be able to zoom in, but it will be a lot faster, as long as you stay in the library module. Things will start to slow down if you start doing 1:1 magnification or going into the Develop module.