Okay so, here’s the thing. Lightroom is not necessarily the most optimized application and if you’re finding that the overall performance is a little bit slow, well, this article is going to help you out. In fact, I’m going to run you through every possible thing that you can do to get Lightroom to perform at its quickest. So let’s go ahead and jump in. I’m going to start from the top with our preferences. Let’s press control comma or command comma to get to our preferences, why? Because we are bosses that use shortcuts. What we’re going to do is go over to performance. So this is the big tab inside of the preferences, where we want to make sure that we set up correctly everything that we need here. Starting with the top, camera raw uses graphic processor, now this is a new function actually in the latest version of Lightroom where we have this ability to have an additional graphic processor boost in having Lightroom use the GPU.
Graphics Processor
We want this set to auto, if you’re on previous versions of Lightroom, it’s usually a check box that just says use graphics processor. I would recommend updating the latest one because the latest one does have some performance improvements here. But right now it’s correctly selecting auto and it’s using my Nvidia Quadro P4000. So next, let’s go down to camera raw cache settings, this one’s a big one. Now we want not only the catalog location, but also the cache location to be on the fastest internal hard drive. Ideally, this is like an NVMe drive or an SSD drive, whatever you have available, you want those drives set up for your cache as well as you want your catalog and the images there too. This means do not, and I repeat, do not use an external hard drive to edit from or to use it for cache.
Internal SSD
That immediately is going to become a bottleneck because USB-3 and even Thunderbolt speeds are vastly inferior to SSDs and even internal, regular spinning hard drives, but ideally you’re using an internal SSD or an internal NVMe drive. We want to set the camera raw cache location to that spot. So I have set up an SSD drive with LR cache is the folder that I just store all my cash files to. The maximum size, you’re going to adjust this, I think it comes default at five gigabytes. What I would recommend is making the default size the typical size of let’s say, one of your catalogs, now for us, we shoot weddings, right? So the typical size of a wedding is going to be between 50 to maybe 80 gigabytes worth of data. We want it to be a little bit larger than that.
Why? Because we have to store all the different variations of previews on this drive. I want to be able to store all the previews within this cash folder without running out of cache memory that’s been dedicated. So on the safe side, go between 100 and 250 gigs, or if you want to calculate it out, you totally can take the maximum number of images you used per catalog, multiply it by the preview size or just be safe and set it to a high number. So 100 gigs is sufficient for me. I’d recommend you guys start at that place as well. Video cache we’re not really using Lightroom for video stuff, but you could tweak it in the same way that you would stills cache. So if you want to choose a different location you just select choose, and you set up your location for them. Next, under the develop module, I definitely like to disable this option.
So this enable hover preview of presets in loop view is really irritating. So if I press okay on that, what happens is when I’m in the develop module and I hover over any of these different adjustments, it automatically is going to tweak the image to each of these different settings, it’s just annoying. It’s crazy, it just flashes back and forth, like all these different things. So just disable that function, we don’t need it, we can already see the preview in the navigator window. If we want to see it applied, just click the preset, so disable this.
Smart Previews
The next big one is to use smart previews instead of originals for image editing. This is one that I had turned on and it’s one that also affects, remember how we talked about that banding thing earlier? Well, when you’re using smart previews to edit, it’s using a lower resolution version of the image to edit.
So unless I zoom into the image, if I zoom in, it’s going to load the full one-to-one preview, but when I’m just zoomed out and working, it’s using a smart preview, which is going to greatly help in speeding up Lightroom performance. There’s also another cool trick there, which I’m going to show you guys in just a second. Catalog settings, we do have a couple other things that we want to talk about in catalog settings when it comes to performance settings, but for now preview generation settings, we do want to generate previews in parallel, this just means it’s going to generate all your previews at once, so if you select multiple different versions of previews, one-to-one, standard previews, smart previews, it’s going to generate them all simultaneously. Okay, so before we go on to catalog settings, let’s discuss that smart preview option briefly. So let’s go to the grid view and let’s show our originals folder.
So I’m going to go right click on this and say, show in explore, so it pulls it up in finder or in explore. What I’m going to do is actually disconnect this folder by typing in anything to modify the file folder name. So what I’m going to say it’s originals X. Now Lightroom loses the location of my images, but I can still actually edit my files, why? Because I have that option selected of using smart previews instead of originals for image editing. So anytime it disconnects or anytime we remove the hard drive or whatever we might do, we can actually use those smart previews for editing and you can even export with them to lower resolutions as well. This is useful for two reasons. One, you can actually on computers and some people will still report, we used to do this as an old hack where we would disconnect the drive just to edit on smart previews simply to speed up Lightroom.
Now with this option selected, supposedly you don’t need to do that anymore because Lightroom is just going to edit off those smart previews but if you want to ensure that Lightroom is never loading a one-to-one preview, then all you’re going to do is disconnect the folder like we just did. In addition, if you’re traveling, for example, you can have all of your raw files on your, let’s say maybe it’s on a whatever drive at home, and you could take that catalog with the smart previews onto your laptop. You don’t need the original files anymore, you can just have that option enabled and from your laptop, you can edit using the smart previews, then when you get back home, you just replace the catalog back home and all the images will sync up, okay? So you can edit while away from the originals by using that option.
So to fix this, I’m just going to go back here and now I’m going to remove this little X here and now with it named the same again it syncs back up to Lightroom and we’re good. Okay, so let’s go back to our general preferences by pressing control comma or command comma. From here, we can actually go directly to catalog settings or we can get there by pressing control alt comma or command alt comma. Now the main ones on this side is, well, we do want to have backup set to each time Lightroom exits it’s going to back up our catalog, just remember that that doesn’t back up your actual images and that’s not really a performance related function, but it’s here so let’s just briefly mentioned that. On the file handling size, if you’re noticing performance loss, what I would do is make sure your standard preview is set to really the maximum resolution that you need.
And if you’re working on a display that’s 10 ADP, the max resolution you need is 1920 pixels, but you can even lower it a little bit since the filmstrip and other things are taking up screen real estate, you could get away with 1680 pixels. If you’re on a 4K display, you’re going to want probably 20 to 80 pixels, otherwise, things are going to look pixelated. But you could potentially turn the preview quality to medium as well and that’s going to, again, give you a little boost in overall performance. Okay, the next thing on the metadata side is there are some details here that will make a difference. One, automatically write changes in XMP. What this is going to do is anytime we make an adjustment, it’s going to create a sidecar file for that image, let me show you what this means.
So if I go to this image and I go ahead and I make an adjustment, and then I actually show this image in the finder window, so let’s go ahead and show in Explorer. What you’ll see is now for every image that we have, we have this separate XMP file that’s saved out. It’s not a huge deal. If I actually go to the detail side you can see now that we have XMP’s for everything. This isn’t a big deal, they don’t take up much space. The problem here is, is that every time you make an adjustment, it’s going to write that adjustment to two locations, to the catalog as well as to XMP’s. So you can potentially see a difference in performance by having that option enabled.
The benefit of having this option enabled is if your catalog goes corrupt, all of your settings are saved out in the XMP files and when you re-import them into a new catalog, it’s a secondary backup essentially for the catalog itself. So with XMP’s, you don’t have to ever worry about losing the develop settings on your images because they’re saved in the catalog as well as a separate XMP file for each image within the catalog. So it’s a nicety and if you don’t notice a performance difference then I would keep it enabled. Okay so, automatically write changes into XMP. Next thing I’m going to turn off the automatically detect all faces because that is going to slow down Lightroom as it’s looking for faces when it comes to performance.
Conclusion
Okay so, we’ve talked now about the general performance preferences, we’ve gone through the catalog settings and preferences, now let’s talk about, well, before you begin working, we want to make sure that you render your previews. And just one more time, go to the library module, make sure that you go to library, dropdown to previews and you’re going to build one-to-one and smart previews before you begin working. So that’s going to be that next step before you start. Okay so, last thing, if you are working in one major catalog, you can go to your preferences and under performance you have this option to optimize the catalog. So really this doesn’t make too big of a difference unless you are working with a massive sized catalog and you haven’t run this optimization in a long time, it can potentially help but for most of us, all the other options that we gave you are going to be the best bet. All right, so that’s it for making sure that your Lightroom is working at the peak efficiency and performance based on your machine and spec, let’s go ahead and go onto the next article.
