Lightroom is running too slow! What to try before buying a new computer
Lightroom is an incredible program. It changes massive numbers of pixels in astoundingly intelligent ways. The size and amount of data in RAW photos and the impressive editing capabilities of Lightroom also means that it takes large amounts of computing power. It’s really miraculous that we can run something like this on a personal computer.
At some point, most photographers experience slow runtimes in Lightroom. Among the most common posts in photography Facebook groups goes something like “Lightroom is running slow on my computer, so I’m going to buy a new one. Which one should I get?” While there are cases when buying a new computer will help speed up Lightroom, it’s important to first understand where in your computing power the bottleneck is. Otherwise at best you end up wasting a lot of money on a new computer when a simple upgrade would have been sufficient or at worst the new computer may not solve the problem at all. To try and help people avoid this, I’ve put together the following list of things to check before deciding it’s time to upgrade your computer.
1. Your External Hard Drive
RAW files are normally very large, so most photographers don’t store their photos locally and instead use external storage. The speed of this storage is the most common cause of Lightroom slowing down (and has nothing to do with the internal components of your computer). When Lightroom needs to render an image, it has to go to where it is stored on the external device and read the photo into short term memory on your computer. If your external storage is too slow, that’s going to slow down Lightroom’s performance no matter what kind of computer you’re using.
There are a few things you can try to see if the hard drive is the problem. First, if you have an SSD internal on your computer, try moving a few of the RAW files onto your local hard drive and editing them on Lightroom from there. If the performance is substantially better, there’s a good chance it’s the external drive slowing things down. If you don’t already have an external SSD, it may be worthwhile investing in one anyway and you can see if that improves performance.
If you suspect the hard drive may be the issue, the solution is as simple as buying a better external drive. There are two factors that will determine how well your hard drive speeds up performance. The first is the read and write speed of the hard drive itself. The major determinant of this is the storage type. Basically, SSDs are substantially faster than HDDs. That said, there is significance of within-type variance, so make sure to check the specs of the drive you’re buying.
The second factor is the connection type. It doesn’t do you much good to get a super fast SSD and then connect it to your computer via USB-2. Make sure that your drive has a connection type that can support the speed you’re looking for. My personal favorite is a NAS. It’s a bit of an investment upfront, but well worthwhile. Look for an upcoming blog on the advantages of a NAS and how to shop for one.
2. Your hard drive is full
Computers tend to slow down when you have less than 60 or 70 GB available on your internal hard drive. If your hard drive is too full, it’s cleaning it off will help increase performance.
3. Other programs you have open
Remember that things like processing power and memory are shared resources, so if you have 80 tabs open in your web browser running in the background, it’s going to slow down Lightroom. It’s generally a good idea to have as few other programs as possible running other than Lightroom.
Along with this, viruses can take up a ton of your computing power. If you haven’t run a virus scan in a while, it’s more than worth doing.
4. Your computer hygiene practices
If you haven’t shut down your computer in 2 months, that might be part of your problem. If you have 40 background applications running because of things you’ve installed over the years, that’s probably part of your problem. Make sure to take the basic steps, including shutting down your computer every few days and updating it whenever updates are available, to keep your computer in good shape.
If things are in really bad shape, it might be worth trying to reinstall the operating system and giving yourself a clean start on your computer. That can resolve many performance related problems.
5. Your lightroom catalog
There’s a lot of convenience in keeping all of your photos in the same catalog, but eventually if it gets too large, it will start to slow down performance. Try creating a fresh new catalog and see if things speed up.
6. Your RAM
This one is a bit on the edge of things that may make you get a new computer. If you have a computer that you can add RAM to, this is something to consider before buying a new one. RAM stands for Random Access Memory. It’s a type of short term memory that your computer uses to store the data that it needs immediate access to for the processes that you’re running. Lightroom takes up a lot of memory space, so if your RAM is filling up, it can really slow down its performance.
The way to find out if this is your problem is to open up task manager or activity monitor and check your memory usage while you’re running Lightroom. If you’re consistently running out of memory while using Lightroom, you may want to invest in some more RAM.
How to know if you need a new computer
If you’ve tried all of the above, there’s a chance that it might help to invest in a new computer. There are a couple of things you may want to check to make sure you’re not missing another bottleneck. The first is to check your memory usage as described above. If you’re not able to add more RAM to your computer, you might need to invest in a new one.
The second is to check how much of your CPU you’re using while using Lightroom. If you’re using a very high percentage of your CPU power while using Lightroom, that may be your problem, which could indicate that a new computer will help.
Conclusion
While a new computer might help speed up your Lightroom workflow, there are a number of bottlenecks that might be causing performance to suffer. A new computer, especially one well equipped for photo editing, is a big investment. It’s worth trying the steps above before deciding that you need to upgrade.