Lightroom 4 slow slow slow - very disappointed [Updated 6 june 2012]

I didn't have any troubles with the catalog transfer. But on the other hand, I only had very few photos transferred over, because I'd recently switched from PC to Mac, and chose not to transfer my PC catalog to the Mac.

I wasn't really interested in LR4 but the cheaper than anticipated upgrade price has me interested, maybe I'll wait for a little while to see how things work themselves out.

Being somewhat of a noob with Lightroom I just learnt to create separate catalogs which greatly increased the speed of the program, having all 100gb of photos in one catalog became a real problem but now I've split them up and the program runs much more smoothly.

Has transfering the catalogs and setting over to LR4 been an issue, i've heard that there are a few problems and you may loose a few changes.
 
I bought 3 when it went on sale because I already knew that my computer could not handle the specs of 4. I still haven't installed 3 but even if it's slow it will be an improvement over the photoshop elements 2 I have been using the last, what.. decade?
 
a bit of an update

This is a fairly warm issue on the Adobe forums and feedback site. There are lots of theories and magic bullets flying about, with which I won't bore you (the latter don't work, the former are so much uninformed gossip) ...

For what it's worth, I have tried two things:

First I deleted Camera Raw cache & the entire Previews folder, then rebuilt all previews (1:1)
This made no difference

Then I renamed my old catalogue, restarted LR4, created a completely new catalogue and imported all my images, creating 1:1 previews on import; finally I read in metadata from disc (I save my edits as xmp sidecar files - it's a catalogue setting)

This seems to have improved matters somewhat - there is still a noticeable but not unbearable lag when zooming, but more importantly, sliders are no longer laggy - it works about as well as LR3.6 in this respect.

For me this wasn't too much of a hardship as I have less than 3K images.

The major downside is I have lost all the autostacked raw+jpg/virtualcopies, and detailed history for each edit.

Other people who have experienced similar speed issues might want to try this; make sure, of course, that you have your images and catalogue(s) backed up securely before doing so; I am not at all an expert in LR, and if you run into trouble I'm unlikely to be able to help ... :(
 
A post from the Adobe forums regarding the speed issue:

"The Lightroom team is investigating this problem. Right now we attempting to nail down the specific issue/ issues. Just be aware that development may go dark on the forums while trying to research this problem. In addition we may be contacting people individually for more information.
Thanks,
Jeff Van de Walker
Lightroom QE
"

"QE" stands for "Quality Engineer", apparently ... pity they couldn;t have employed one before they released it :D
 
I have installed Lightroom 4 on my iMac (about 3.5 years old) and imported my catalogue of Lightroom 3. Until now I have not seen any problems. Lightroom 4 is about as fast as Lightroom 3, it even feels a little bit faster. I have developed only eight new and some old images in Lightroom 4, which has been a pleasure! It seems to be better in every respect.

I work as software developer and I know how difficult it is to guarantee that such a big program works on so many machines with so many different hardwares and different versions of operating systems. It is not difficult, it is impossible. We don't know the reason for the performance problems on some machines and therefore we do not know, if Adobe could and should have done something to prevent that. There is no bug free program and it can happen, that one works hard and well and sees problems like that.
 
Yes, software is never bug-free ... however during a long period of my career, I also worked in software, managing a team of support engineers and software engineers, for a very successful commercial software house in the manufacturing sector ... their product ran to two dozen modules and hundreds of thousands of lines of code ... and I had final sign off for each release of that product for a number of years .. I also had to cope with the aftermath of at least one disastrous release (prior to my taking over final sign off) that stopped factories working ... what I learned during that time is that while minor bugs can and do always slip through, it is perfectly possible to implement thorough beta testing with users, and in-house test harnesses and quality assurance protocols so that only on the rarest occasions do show-stoppers get out the door ... and I feel no inclination to let Adobe off the hook ...
 
pdh, I don't know, what causes the performance problems, and I think, you don't know it, either. As far as I can see, only some people experience this problem, while for most people this problem does not exist. As long as we don't know the cause, we cannot say, if Adobe has made some mistakes regarding quality control or not. That does not mean, that Adobe is to be let off the hook, but it means, that one should not judge until one knows enough to judge. This is a matter of ethics and intellectual integrity, too.

Two years ago I tested several programs. At last I wanted either Aperture or Lightroom. Aperture is a good program and offered several features I missed in Lightroom. However, the first release of Aperture had so many obvious and critical bugs (many exported JPEGs were black, for example), while the beta versions of Lightroom 3 were very stable, I actually had no single problem with the Betas of Lightroom. I have never had any single problem with Lightroom since then. I assume, that the long period of beta testing is one of the reasons for this level of quality. It is one of the best programs I know of. When I read about Aperture today, it is nearly always about annoying bugs which are still there.

As far as I remember, the final version of Lightroom 3 was released a little bit later than intended. I suppose, that Adobe has been under much more pressure this time, because of Olympia and the releases of the Nikon D4 and Canon 1Dx. Decisions, when a product is released, are seldom made by software developers and quality engineers, but much more often by the management or marketing. This does not always lead to versions, which are as stable as software developers and quality engineers wish. However, I cannot see anything, which hints that Lightroom 4 is particularly buggy.
 
Not knowing the answer to something does not mean one cannot make a comment about it or have a feeling about it.

At the same time, to say that " I cannot see anything, which hints that Lightroom 4 is particularly buggy." may be true in your case, on your Mac ... in my case, on my Lenovo, I see 80-90% processor utilisation for much of the time, and extreme slowness in the UI ... as this does not occur in any other program, but only in LR4, then, by a process of elimination, the problem lies with LR4 and not elsewhere.

Whether we choose to call it a bug or a feature or a coding error or a hardware incompatibility or whatever, there is s significant problem present that causes the software not to function as expected

As you will have seen from my posts, I am not making any claims to know the causes of the problem, but there is clearly an effect, which is being felt by a number of users, and which has been acknowledged as a problem by Adobe themselves.

This may indeed have the stamp of sales and marketing forcing early release, but equally you cannot know that just as I cannot know the root causes of the software problem.
 
As you will have seen from my posts, I am not making any claims to know the causes of the problem, but there is clearly an effect, which is being felt by a number of users, and which has been acknowledged as a problem by Adobe themselves.

I do not deny that there is a problem and have never done that. In my opinion software generally has way too many bugs, especially major releases are very critical, and I really hate that.

In the meantime I have developed more pictures with Lightroom 4 and have seen, that some actions are faster, but as a whole it is slower than Lightroom 3 indeed. My initial impression was too optimistic, maybe because it was much quicker than I feared due to my very negative expectation I had after reading this thread. My main complaint is the slight delay changes by moving sliders come into effect. I have not realized that until yesterday. The delay seems to be less problematic as others describe, but it is there. I can live with that, since there are some really great improvements, but it is annoying. I have not realized that in the first case and I don't know why. Maybe it is a setting I have done in the meantime or maybe it's because the delay is slight enough. I don't know, but I know, that I can develope my images more efficiently in Lightroom 4 than in Lightroom 3 in spite of the slight delays.
 
Back
Top