Lightroom speed

MartinH32

MartinH32

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792
Name
Martin
Edit My Images
No
I'd love to know if there was an alternative product to Lightroom with the editing and digital file management and cataloging that this provides. I'm sure I waste at least an hour on every wedding I edit due to it's complete lack of speed. Thoughts?
 
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Since you're on Mac and working with Nikon like me,
I could recommend you Capture One Pro. I did the
switch 5+ years ago and don't look back.
 
Capture One Pro as Kodiak says, though it's far from cheap. Also consider DXO optics pro, which is good if you like the software to 'help' with the processing to speed things up, and On1 Photo Raw which is also relatively fast compared to lightroom if you have a decent computer with a well-spec'd graphics card.

If you're using an older mac then that will certainly slow things. My Core 2 Duo Macbook was terrible with 20MP RAW files, and I wouldn't even think of using the 24MP images from my D610 with it. Having both OS and images on SSD can make a big difference too, though if your mac is recent then you'll have no upgrade path..
 
It'd be interesting to know your workflow, I find LR snappy to use on a relatively modest PC, but I make LR do all the donkey work before I start on my files.

I download all cards in Explorer, copy to backup drive and import into LR and create full sized previews, set the cloud backup running then go to bed.

Next day doing edits is snappy because LR never spends time rendering larger files, I use a midi device for adjustments.

I figure storage space is cheap and my time isn't.

For quick selections, many pros rate photomechanic, but I could never justify the expense of a program just for the edit.
 
LR isn't quick. If there was a decent competitor Adobe would have bought them by now and shut them down. They have done this several times.
 
Just a left-field suggestion...

You could try an iPad Pro, as LR Mobile has been completely recoded and isn't stuck in the dark ages from an app design point of view and it is super fast, no lag or waiting at all.

Other than that, as Phil says, I can quite happily use my low spec laptop on LR and it isn't instant at rendering but quick enough not to be frustrating.
 
What size are people's databases? Mine seems to be approaching 1.2GB and 150k photos (700GB worth). It's slow just loading the photo counts down the left side of the library view in the folders. And I have a core i7 with 16GB ram and a screaming fast SSD. The photos themselves are elsewhere, on a Nas. Rendering, who cares how long it takes (well, apart from it being slightly embarrassing that the camera can render ten frames a second and the core i7 can only do one every two seconds), but the UI needs to respond fast. Try doing a reasonably large clone/heal. Takes 5-10 seconds to update the preview.
 
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As some have suggested Capture One Pro, you can download a free 30 day trial to test it out, also there are a few tutorials on youtube for it.
 
LR can't fix the speed issues without a complete ground up redesign. The architecture is inefficient, end of story.

Also, a free trial doesn't give you time to get the amount of edit history and tagging history in to a new app that many have accumulated in LR and which is what drags it down. Making accurate performance comparison is very hard - it takes a long time to get to a fully built state.

If however you are a professional and disciplined enough to export out each job when it's complete rather than leaving them hanging about in the LR database then you can get the best from it.
 
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I've started using Smart Previews for editing the files from my 5D4 as an experiment. First impressions are pretty good so I will probably start to use them across all my cameras.

My pc is pretty quick even at 5 years old but if it helps then I'm up for it.
 
Whilst is has some performance issues, it seems to be quite trending to slag off Lightrooms performance. There are however several things you can do to improve the performance of Lightroom and it helps if you design your system to take advantage of this.
I have a SSD for the OS, a separate SSD for the cache and catalogue files, another SSD for this years raw files, then a large raid disk for the previous years raws and exports

Render your 1:1 previews on import, which also generate the minimal and standard previews. It takes longer to import, but as these 1:1 are used when you zoom images in the library or develop module, if not previously generated these will be generated as needed and then appear to slow the program significantly.

There's a very good document on how to improve Lightrooms performance. Do these and it runs fine. I have a 140K image catalogue running without performance issues.
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

If you do go Capture One with a NAS as storage, be very careful of your CIFs/SMB connection to your NAS. Apples implementation of SMB2 is flakey and slow, broken from Mavericks onwards. Rather than make a SMB://nas connection, use CIFS://nas to force the MAc to use SMB1. With SMB2 the Capture one database gets corrupted.
 
I would also suggest Capture One, as I am one of those who find LR slow to use and C1 much faster. C1 is however slow to launch if you have large catalogues, and an option is to use sessions in C1 rather than catalogues, creating a new session per wedding. I split C1 catalogues by year, and combine this with global catalogues for all my images using Media Pro and Neofinder

See this link for more C1 and wedding photography

http://blog.phaseone.com/capture-one-wedding-photography-workflow/

They talk about "sessions" in this blog posts. Sessions work like catalogues, but you set up a session per project (wedding) and it keeps all the raw file, final files, and even deleted files, in a single file structure that can easily be archived, backed up, and moved between computers, taking everything related to that project with it.

There is also this link on customising the C1 workspace for wedding photography workflow

http://blog.phaseone.com/workspace-wedding/

Edit: Mmmm, I see this bit on the workspace doesn't say very much, I had only read some of the other posts in this series on customising the workspace (which are more detailed) and didn't read it before posting the link, sorry. The point is that you have tremendous control in how you set up the workspace, so you can make it match your workflow.

And a couple of youtube videos on using Capture one for weddings, The second one is rather old

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epWPYMWvOtw


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEheKiYlPfM


Note I haven't photographed a wedding for 30 years, so I'm not directly recommending C1 for weddings, but much prefer it to Lightroom.

Cheers,
Graham
 
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Phil V said:
It'd be interesting to know your workflow, I find LR snappy to use on a relatively modest PC, but I make LR do all the donkey work before I start on my files.

I download all cards in Explorer, copy to backup drive and import into LR and create full sized previews, set the cloud backup running then go to bed.

Next day doing edits is snappy because LR never spends time rendering larger files, I use a midi device for adjustments.

I figure storage space is cheap and my time isn't.

For quick selections, many pros rate photomechanic, but I could never justify the expense of a program just for the edit.
Click to expand...

drdocmatt said:
What size are people's databases? Mine seems to be approaching 1.2GB and 150k photos (700GB worth). It's slow just loading the photo counts down the left side of the library view in the folders. And I have a core i7 with 16GB ram and a screaming fast SSD. The photos themselves are elsewhere, on a Nas. Rendering, who cares how long it takes (well, apart from it being slightly embarrassing that the camera can render ten frames a second and the core i7 can only do one every two seconds), but the UI needs to respond fast. Try doing a reasonably large clone/heal. Takes 5-10 seconds to update the preview.
Click to expand...

It's a 12 month old iMac i5 running just short of 4Ghz, 2tb fusion drive, 32gb ram. All my previews are done over night 1:1. I then cull (by flagging images as rejects) and then edit. I do edit quickly but find I'm waiting for LR to catch up.
As for the catalogue I've moved to one catalogue per wedding as regardless of what Adobe say my wedding catalogue had nearly 200k images and ran like a dog even after optimisation.
 
DG Phototraining said:
Guys - I know this chap (OP) very well indeed - he's not going to be happy unless he gets a computer NASA would want, and 3 naked Bunny girls to assist his editing ;)

Dave
Click to expand...
Lol, time is money Dave, time is money! I know you're older than me and do things a little slower and so it's probably quite quick for you. However, I don't think editing would be a priority if I had the bunny girls, so perhaps that's the answer?????
 
Regarding C1, I have a license, its toolset is great and results admirable, but if you do a lot of tagging and organising it falls woefully short. I couldn't get it to fit into my specific workflow due to this, which bugs me greatly. Also Phase's politicising of the software with respect to brand support makes me very very nervous about throwing in on it 100%.
 
Denyerec said:
Regarding C1, I have a license, its toolset is great and results admirable, but if you do a lot of tagging and organising it falls woefully short. I couldn't get it to fit into my specific workflow due to this, which bugs me greatly. Also Phase's politicising of the software with respect to brand support makes me very very nervous about throwing in on it 100%.
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Can you explain where you think it falls short in tagging and organising, and whether this refers to the latest release, as this sort of things seems to improve with each point release.

I don't make a lot of use of this in C1, as I tag and organise in other programs, which are then read by C1 through XMP sidecars, so can't make a judgement, and would be interested, in where you see the problems.

On your other point, are you just talking about their policy on not supporting medium format, which isn't really brand thing, but still irritating, or is there something else behind that comment. Rumour has it, that they might be reconsidering this policy for the smaller sensor medium format cameras as they aren't seen as direct competition for Phase One cameras.

Thanks,
Graham
 
myotis said:
Can you explain where you think it falls short in tagging and organising, and whether this refers to the latest release, as this sort of things seems to improve with each point release.

I don't make a lot of use of this in C1, as I tag and organise in other programs, which are then read by C1 through XMP sidecars, so can't make a judgement, and would be interested, in where you see the problems.

On your other point, are you just talking about their policy on not supporting medium format, which isn't really brand thing, but still irritating, or is there something else behind that comment. Rumour has it, that they might be reconsidering this policy for the smaller sensor medium format cameras as they aren't seen as direct competition for Phase One cameras.

Thanks,
Graham
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Sure, latter point first as it's easier to deal with. A couple of contacts of mine shoot non-phase MF and have been growing increasingly concerned about Phase using their software to edge out competition. There's nothing openly confirmed, but it's a concern they have and obviously if you're putting down that amount of money on a camera system, software support is quite critical. (Fuji GFX in this case).

I keep meaning to check in on Hassleblad's Phocus software, though again that's another platform that could be used "politically", as it were, and it doesn't seem to get a lot of attention.

With respect to metadata, my needs are fairly specific and C1 flat out doesn't work for me. That's not to say it doesn't work for others, but I shoot many different people in a shoot, in no fixed order. In LR I can have an assistant (Or even manage it myself) tag the images via numpad hotkey as they're shot. Filtering out shots for a particular person is equally trivial. All organisation methods I've seen recommended for C1 involve different capture folders which must be set pre-shot, something that doesn't work in my environment. Attempting to quickly add keywords from a list in C1 was an exercise in frustration and, as I can never guarantee if my assistant will have seen C1 before, is very confusing to try and demonstrate . Lightroom is so trivially simple to use I could probably get away with training a cat to do it if it came to it. Again, once data is metadata tagged, filtering it is more convoluted in C1 than it should be. Not impossible, just uncomfortable compared to the ease with which one can command LR's filtering toolbar. I also seem to remember that there was an issue in C1 whereby you could not use keywords in a filename. This for me was a complete showstopper, as that's part of how I identify files for dispatch in my workflow. Several workarounds were suggested to me by Phase, but all of them were very hackish. The situation in C1 v10 might be different, but I haven't felt it necessary to cough up the upgrade fee to find out.

I'd be delighted to spend a day with a C1 expert to find out if all of my issues were simply PEBCAKs or serious shortfalls in the software, as keeping an option open is always a good idea, and LR's performance is really tanking.
 
Denyerec said:
Sure, latter point first as it's easier to deal with. A couple of contacts of mine shoot non-phase MF and have been growing increasingly concerned about Phase using their software to edge out competition. There's nothing openly confirmed, but it's a concern they have and obviously if you're putting down that amount of money on a camera system, software support is quite critical. (Fuji GFX in this case).
Click to expand...

Thanks, I thought from your original comment that Phase had "suddenly" taken a new position on specific makes, rather than file formats, but this is the policy they have always had. As long as I've used them, they have been like this. As I said in the last post they did hint at one stage they might be reconsidering this with smaller MF cameras such as the Fuji GFX (when it was introduced), but not picked up anything since then.

I always thought that Phocus had the same policy as Phase, but I have only read their web page where it says they "...work with both Hasselblad images and those captured with their 35mm DSLRs in one and the same application." Do they actually support the Fuji (and the Pentax) as well? The Fuji has certainly made MF a bit more of an affordable possibility for me, especially as I shoot square, and it seems most of my existing 35mm Nikon lenses will easily cover the 1:1 ratio of the Fuji GFX Sensor.

With respect to metadata, my needs are fairly specific and C1 flat out doesn't work for me.
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Yes this is very specific, and I won't dare to make suggestions. But, have you seen the recent Phase One Blog that seems to describe working with this exact, or similar, problem, its here

I think its using some of the new token features they added with 10.1, and its says:

"The power of this setup is that you are now able to simply right click the Capture Folder in the top of the Library Tool, select ‘New > Capture Folder’ and name it the initials of the next person, for example, JFU. The images will now automatically be stored in a folder called JFU as well as named accordingly..."

If you haven't read this, and seen its no help, it might be worth looking at.
 
myotis said:
Yes this is very specific, and I won't dare to make suggestions. But, have you seen the recent Phase One Blog that seems to describe working with this exact, or similar, problem, its here

I think its using some of the new token features they added with 10.1, and its says:

"The power of this setup is that you are now able to simply right click the Capture Folder in the top of the Library Tool, select ‘New > Capture Folder’ and name it the initials of the next person, for example, JFU. The images will now automatically be stored in a folder called JFU as well as named accordingly..."

If you haven't read this, and seen its no help, it might be worth looking at.
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Yeah that's the methodology I was hinting at - it's no use to me. If the operator forgets to set the destination you're now stuck rummaging through your filesystem to move and rename files by hand and then updating auto-increment indexes on the filenames. Google, Microsoft and Apple tried to get everyone onto a "Search rather than organise" schema and when it comes to things like this I'm inclined to agree. The camera metadata is a fertile ground for organisation, yet it's simply underutilised.

Not being able to name files on export with the keywords was the final nail in the coffin - I don't suppose you can confirm for me if keywords can be used in an export recipe?
 
Denyerec said:
Not being able to name files on export with the keywords was the final nail in the coffin - I don't suppose you can confirm for me if keywords can be used in an export recipe?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure about keywords, but I pretty sure if you use the method discussed in the blog post, which means every photograph of JFU goes in a folder called JFU, you can then use a process recipe to export all files in the C1 JFU folder into a subfolder called JFU and with JFU added to each file name, by using a "folder name" token in the output location. Which would seem to allow you to file the subject by name within C1 as you went along and export them to an easily found and identified location. So it would be if the operator forgot to add the persons name, when you started to take their photographs that you would have a problem.

But I only half watched the webinar where this was explained. I think this increased versatility of tokens is one of the 10.1 enhancement.

I can't actually get to my copy of C1 at the moment to have a look, but will have a look tomorrow.

The webinar here is on "Optimising Export with Process Recipes" goes through lots of export options in terms of adding to file names and setting locations with process recipes.
 
MartinH32 said:
It's a 12 month old iMac i5 running just short of 4Ghz, 2tb fusion drive, 32gb ram. All my previews are done over night 1:1. I then cull (by flagging images as rejects) and then edit. I do edit quickly but find I'm waiting for LR to catch up.
As for the catalogue I've moved to one catalogue per wedding as regardless of what Adobe say my wedding catalogue had nearly 200k images and ran like a dog even after optimisation.
Click to expand...

Did you read my description of drives? Have you just the 2Tb fusion drive and running everything from that, so OS, Lightroom catalogue and cache, Raw files etc? Have you room for another drive in your mac you could put the catalogue and cache on? It really does help performance if you haven't the same drive for everything.
I shot a wedding this weekend, did the import, let the previews build then had no issues with speed. I've 130K+ images in my current catalogue. Initial cull, rotate and scoring in the library module, then moved onto the develop module.
I didn't find any issues with speed once the import and preview were done.
 
"speed" is subjective. In my opinion an app where every interaction results in a user-visible redraw time is slow when you consider the horsepower available to it on these workstations. This is not some 3D seismic modelling app with a 1.2TB dataset being rotated in memory, this is a list of pixel values, sometimes 50 million of them, having mathematical transforms applied.

And interaction with the library isn't even that, it's just database searches. Perhaps they need to upgrade the database to mysql...? ;)
 
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Denyerec said:
Not being able to name files on export with the keywords was the final nail in the coffin - I don't suppose you can confirm for me if keywords can be used in an export recipe?
Click to expand...

I have now checked and I can't see a token option for keyword.

The best I can come up with that if you use the previous method of putting different subjects into unique collections, the process recipe will then rename each files to include the collection name, and then export into folders based on the image name, which would put each model into their own folder.

I have not tried this out, but it might be a way of getting this to work, in a fairly automated way.
 
Denyerec said:
Not being able to name files on export with the keywords was the final nail in the coffin - I don't suppose you can confirm for me if keywords can be used in an export recipe?
Click to expand...

So keywords you've associated with the image you want to use as part of the filename on export? Can you provide an example of using this, your workflow, as the usual methods of custom name, sequence. If you wanted to break up the set into different subsets, you could use the colours tag and sort by rating and colour?

However if you want something bespoke you can use the filename template editor. I believe you can use keywords in that, but it's not something I've used much
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/filename-template-editor-text-template.html
https://photographylife.com/using-filename-template-editor-in-lightroom
 
drdocmatt said:
"speed" is subjective. In my opinion an app where every interaction results in a user-visible redraw time is slow when you consider the horsepower available to it on these workstations. This is not some 3D seismic modelling app with a 1.2TB dataset being rotated in memory, this is a list of pixel values, sometimes 50 million of them, having mathematical transforms applied.

And interaction with the library isn't even that, it's just database searches. Perhaps they need to upgrade the database to mysql...? ;)
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I don't get a user-visible redraw time. Strange. Have you tried without GPU acceleration (Preferences->Performance->uncheck "use graphics processor"),
What size is your cache?
And just out of interest, have you monitored your disk performance whilst having slowness issues with Lightroom?
 
Depends on the operation. The worst response tends to come on e.g. fairly large heal operations (in particular attempting to move he source), but practically any interaction with the library view results in a visible redraw delay for refreshing the thumbnail views. The last thing that gets drawn is always the numbers and overlay icons, it's usually a half second or so before they all appear. HDD is a Samsung SSD that is not that busy, and is definitely capable of about 70k IOPs.
 
drdocmatt said:
"speed" is subjective. In my opinion an app where every interaction results in a user-visible redraw time is slow when you consider the horsepower available to it on these workstations. This is not some 3D seismic modelling app with a 1.2TB dataset being rotated in memory, this is a list of pixel values, sometimes 50 million of them, having mathematical transforms applied.

And interaction with the library isn't even that, it's just database searches. Perhaps they need to upgrade the database to mysql...? ;)
Click to expand...

Hardly. Check my videos, there's nothing subjective about the speed (Or lack of) that I'm experiencing :D
 
Byker28i said:
So keywords you've associated with the image you want to use as part of the filename on export? Can you provide an example of using this, your workflow, as the usual methods of custom name, sequence. If you wanted to break up the set into different subsets, you could use the colours tag and sort by rating and colour?

However if you want something bespoke you can use the filename template editor. I believe you can use keywords in that, but it's not something I've used much
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/filename-template-editor-text-template.html
https://photographylife.com/using-filename-template-editor-in-lightroom
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People appear in a random order at fast pace and are photographed. DT on the laptop tags the photos with the person's name, heavily leveraging the "Recent Keywords" hotkey panel available via ALT+Numpad[0-9]. Occasionally multiple people will appear in the same image, and thus will have multiple keywords associated.
Once the shoot is over, images are selected and exported at web resolution with filename pattern <Keywords>-<SeqNo>.jpg and separated into folders (Lightroom sadly can't create subpaths using keywords on export, I wish it could) and the named JPGs are they moved into <keyword> named folders and then uploaded to shootproof. If an image contains multiple people, it's copied into each person's folder.

I ran a shoot once without the keywords in the filenames once and it was a nightmare trying to chase down selects and organise files quickly over a shoot of ~35 individuals. Never again.
 
Denyerec said:
Hardly. Check my videos, there's nothing subjective about the speed (Or lack of) that I'm experiencing :D
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I didn't see a link? I find it very sluggish sometimes too but then I was used to use pixmantec rawshooter which was blisteringly quick, even on a Pentium 3.
 
Ok I see the video linked in there and I'd say my lightroom performs about the same as yours... Perhaps it doesn't like Core i7 4790s...
 
Denyerec said:
People appear in a random order at fast pace and are photographed. DT on the laptop tags the photos with the person's name, heavily leveraging the "Recent Keywords" hotkey panel available via ALT+Numpad[0-9]. Occasionally multiple people will appear in the same image, and thus will have multiple keywords associated.
Once the shoot is over, images are selected and exported at web resolution with filename pattern <Keywords>-<SeqNo>.jpg and separated into folders (Lightroom sadly can't create subpaths using keywords on export, I wish it could) and the named JPGs are they moved into <keyword> named folders and then uploaded to shootproof. If an image contains multiple people, it's copied into each person's folder.

I ran a shoot once without the keywords in the filenames once and it was a nightmare trying to chase down selects and organise files quickly over a shoot of ~35 individuals. Never again.
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Ah ok. Have you tried the face recognition within Lightroom for that, seems to work quite well. I used it for the football team I photographed every week.
 
Ok, my spec is:
2 x Samsung 850 EVO 500GB 2.5inch SSD
1 x Samsung 950 PRO 512GB M.2 SSD
5 x WD Black 4TB 3.5" SATA Desktop Hard Drive
1 x EVGA Supernova 750W Fully Modular 80+ Gold Power Supply
1 x Asus Maximus VIII Hero Z170 Socket 1151 HDMI DisplayPort 8 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard
1 x Intel core i7 unlocked Skylake 6700k CPU
2 x 16Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR4 PC4-2400 Ram
1 x Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo CPU cooler (120mm fan, very quiet)

(robbed from another thread, built last year)

I have the 950 pro for OS - very fast read/write performance, one evo 850 for lightroom cache and catalogue and the other for this years raw files. I'm just running graphics from the motherboard.

Saturday I shot a wedding, uploaded 602 images and rendered 1:1 previews after upload, took under 10 mins to upload and preview. Can't be exact on timing as I set it going then went to make a coffee came back and it finished, but no more than 10 mins.
On my old 6 year old hardware (dual core xeons, scsi hard drives) ity had definitely slowed down, going from version 4 to 5 to 6, but the new build I've not noticed any issues.
 
drdocmatt said:
How big is your catalogue?
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135K images at present. Raw files/imports on the 5 x 4Tb hard drives as a raid covering years 2003 to 2016, along with the exported jpegs, 2017 raws on the second SSD

On the old hardware, I used to see the develop module take 6-7 secs to open first time selected, under V5 definitely saw Lightroom slow if using adjustment brushes a lot, but on the new hardware, built specifically for Lightroom/photoshop I really don't see any issues.

Interesting issue this. I know the import/render process can be a lot slower than Capture one, but that's a different workflow process than lightroom, where you have multiple catalogues/databases for each project, so they are smaller. One of the things I like about lightroom and the library module is they way I can find images. I can search by metadata, by date using the folders (raw imports go into a yearly folder as they are imported by date captured - Import into subfolder organised by date), by keyword, or by category.

Can you give me a detailed process to follow that you see significant slowdown and I'll reproduce to see if I get the same.
 
Have you tried changing the raw file cache size? (Under file handling in preferences). I vaguely remember being told to increase this from the default value to improve performance. Mine is currently set to 10GB - not sure what it was originally. Just a thought.
 
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