Thanks, TBH it rare that I use photoshop tbh, but useful to know when I do. At the moment efficiency is showing 100% but I'm not processing anything so I assume this will change when processing?
TBH the main trouble I had was that if I sent circa 15 files from LR to PS using the merge in photoshop option, instead of blending them all together in one 'file' it blended 4 in one file, then there was a separate file containing one image and then nothing else. If I converted to jpeg first then it would open up as expected.
Is there a way to check the efficiency of LR as this is what I use most of the time? This is my current performance settings in LR, should I change anything? Do I need to purge cache frequently?
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As I said previously, when it's 'playing up' if I'm in the develop module and quickly flick from one photo to another (which I do often to decide which of a group of photos I want to edit) it can often freeze for several seconds showing the spinning beachball.
You are correct, it will only drop once being used. Lightroom doesn't have that inbuilt efficiency tool that photoshop has. What you can do is click the System Info option and it will show how much ram is in use. This is my iMac when accessing that from Library preview:
Application architecture: x64
Logical processor count: 4
Processor speed: 3.8 GHz
Built-in memory: 53,248.0 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 53,248.0 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 2,982.2 MB (5.6%). This goes to 6300MB - 11% just opening a file in Develop, no edits.
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 11,768.2 MB
Memory cache size: 110.3MB
Internal Camera Raw version: 12.4 [ 555 ]
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 3
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2
Camera Raw virtual memory: 974MB / 26623MB (3%)
Camera Raw real memory: 987MB / 53248MB (1%)
Displays: 1) 6400x3600
You could try increasing the Camera Raw Cache as what "could" be happening is your previews are larger than this. Check this out by clicking Go To Catalog settings and then File Handling option and see what your Preview Cache Total Size is. As an example; my Camera Raw Cache is 100GB which is used for the develop module and the File Handling preview is using 31GB. If you have hit your 20GB limit, any raw file that hasn't had a preview created in that 20GB will need to be drawn, this could be the slowness. Also check the options for Standard preview size, this should be larger than the horizontal resoutlion size of your monitor. I have a 5K display so I chose 6400px, but 2048 is suitable for 1080p displays. Preview quality is also set to High. Im running from SSD so these settings are ok. If you are on a mechanical HD, lowering them will help.
Before Purge the Cache check the above as you need to manually delete the preview & smart preview files to complete this as the button only does the catalog. Doing this will require Lightroom to rebuild it and it could take ages depending on the size of your catalog and the previews. I wouldn't purge unless I had a reason, as anything you do from zooming in to viewing files in Loupe will need to be redrawn and take time. Typically only purge if you are running out of disk space or getting errors.
The beachball is typical apples "you are out of Ram message and its paging to the HDD"