Lightroom slowing my laptop down?

jpgreenwood

jpgreenwood

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jason
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In my files/my pictures, I have over 100 folders containing all photos i've taken, stored by Lightroom. I assume this is the catalogue?
I have noticed recently that my laptop is really struggling when using LR or PS.
I always store my photos on a sperate portable HD so do I really need all these RAW files on my laptop?
Each file contains hundreds of NEF files of about 15-20mb each.

If I delete these, will it make my laptop respond quicker? Its a good spec Lenovo i5 Ideapad.
C'drive properties say I have used 329GB and have 558GB free space.
 
jpgreenwood said:
In my files/my pictures, I have over 100 folders containing all photos i've taken, stored by Lightroom. I assume this is the catalogue?
I have noticed recently that my laptop is really struggling when using LR or PS.
I always store my photos on a sperate portable HD so do I really need all these RAW files on my laptop?
Each file contains hundreds of NEF files of about 15-20mb each.

If I delete these, will it make my laptop respond quicker? Its a good spec Lenovo i5 Ideapad.
C'drive properties say I have used 329GB and have 558GB free space.
Click to expand...

No it won’t you must have another issue. Lightroom does not cause this sort of problem.

I have well over a thousand folders and around 8tb of raw files on my p.c and have no speed issues.
 
Agreed. Provided your computer isn't needing to use the hard drive for swap-file space then the number of image folders and amount of data will have no effect of computer performance - in the case of your machine with 558GB free they would make absolutely no difference. Also these folders are NOT the catalogue - that is a completely separate database file stored separately by lightroom.

There's lots of reasons machines go slow - driver issues, poor updates, new software, deleted software leaving stuff behind, registry issues, antivirus checkers, viruses & more. Does the laptop run fast when not using LR/PS and ONLY slow down when they are used? Do you reboot the machine regularly, only use LR/PS as first booted software and with nothing else running in the background?
 
Yes it runs fine normally, but LR and PS do take a good while to boot up and load files.
 
HDD - not SSD? That will make things slow, although they shoudn't be slower than they once were.
 
Have you checked the resources manager which monitors cpu usage and ram usage?
 
f/2.8 said:
No it won’t you must have another issue. Lightroom does not cause this sort of problem.

I have well over a thousand folders and around 8tb of raw files on my p.c and have no speed issues.
Click to expand...

I do hope you've backed them all up!

And not just once!
 
Lightroom on my PC is fine with Canon RAW files but my Fuji RAW slow it down really badly, I can hit a button to make a change on a picture and it can be over 10 seconds before it reacts.
 
jpgreenwood said:
In my files/my pictures, I have over 100 folders containing all photos i've taken, stored by Lightroom. I assume this is the catalogue?
I have noticed recently that my laptop is really struggling when using LR or PS.
I always store my photos on a sperate portable HD so do I really need all these RAW files on my laptop?
Each file contains hundreds of NEF files of about 15-20mb each.

If I delete these, will it make my laptop respond quicker? Its a good spec Lenovo i5 Ideapad.
C'drive properties say I have used 329GB and have 558GB free space.
Click to expand...

Those folders are where your photos are actually stored - if you delete them, you are deleting your photos. It may be that they are a duplicate of what is on your portable drive. The Catalog is more like an address book that points to where the photos are, it doesn't actually store the photos. When you make changes in Lightroom, it saves these changes along with the 'address' of where the photos are.

Your catalog may be pointing to the photos on your computer or it may be pointing to the photos on your hard drive. You can find out where the photos in the catalog are pointing to, by right clicking on a folder in Lightroom and clicking on 'show in finder' or perhaps it is 'show in explorer' on windows. If your photos are on a separate hard drive that will likely be slower than accessing them if they are on your computer.
 
I believe one of the things that can slow it down is if your cache is too small - under preferences > performance. Mine is set to 10GB, not sure if that could make a difference. I think I read/heard somewhere that 20GB was a good size, but can't remember the source.
 
Bebop said:
I believe one of the things that can slow it down is if your cache is too small - under preferences > performance. Mine is set to 10GB, not sure if that could make a difference. I think I read/heard somewhere that 20GB was a good size, but can't remember the source.
Click to expand...

Probably Adobe: https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/lightroom/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

@jpgreenwood Jason, it's probably worth you working your way through the article too, if you've not done so already.
 
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