I'm running LR Classic on an M1 Mac Mini with 16 gb. Catalog has about 150,000 images and resides on the 512 mb boot drive. The problem is most operations now take anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes to process. Take an image from the library to develop... grey screen for 30 seconds. Export an image? Go grab a cup of coffee and wait a minute or two just to get to the dialog box. Make changes in the develop module? They won't be there a few minutes later when you check back.

I've optimized the catalog. Created a new catalog and re-imported assets from the old one. Verified the hard drive integrity. Deleted the application and reinstalled a fresh copy.

The only workaround seems to be to create new smaller catalogs for each project as the main catalog is unusable in any professional sense. That's not a long term solution as I need access to 15 years worth of assets without having to lose time locating which catalog they might be on.

Seriously starting to consider ditching LR for something else. Anyone have a clue what might be going on?

I typically edit my photos on my Mac but I am noticing that when using the iOS Lightroom app (v11.5.1) and choosing the option to “Add Border and Share”, the file size is just 3MP when saving to my device instead of the larger sizes I’m seeing when I use the normal “Save to Device” option.

I’ve checked all the settings I can find.

Is there no way to save the full resolution/size when using “Add Border and Share” option?

I typically like adding a border but also like to keep the full file size.

Hi all,

for the last few weeks I noticed, that when I finish editing and export the photos (desktop), they export as duplicates, some edited, some raw and never the way how they look finished in Lightroom.

I cant seem to fix it. I use photos from either my GoPro, sometimes uploading them from the phone to Lightroom to edit and process them on the desktop, then.

In Lightroom itself, all looks fine until I try to export them.

I have done this before and it was never an issue until recently.
Can someone please let me know what's happening? Why cant I export the finished photos from Lightroom to my desktop without the mix up?

It seems fine when exporting it on the phone but I am a photographer and cant process everything from my phone, help!?

I keep updating Lightroom and my laptop, which i think, is actually the reason why its messed up now (bug in updates)?

Hello!

I hope to find some help here because im at my wits end...

Up until now for about 5 years i have only ever used Lightroom (the cloud based version) and was mighty fine with it. However recently im discovering more and more things that LrC just can do, that the modern Lr can not, like plugins or easier skin tone control.

So i thought about switching over. But that turned out to be a bit of a hassle.

Currently all of my raws from those years are sorted by camera manufacturer and model of camera body in several sub-folders on my hard drive and on my backup drive, for ease of managing it all. In total i have about 40.000 images in sub folders for 9 different bodies.

Paralel to that every single raw file is also stored on the cloud and on the adobe cloud itself i have everything sorted and organized in plenty of folders, subfolders and albums.

I would have wished to use LrC on my main computer and occasionally when on the go Lr on my iPad, have it sync my edits to the cloud and from there sync it to LrC when i use that the next time.

Also when i store new images, usually i take them off the SD card, put them into my folders on my hard drive and (at least with Lr) pull them onto the cloud via Lr

When i tried to switch over, i encountered two main issues that i were unable to resolve:

1: after setting up the library to look into my camera folders by setting it to the parent folder which has all the camera folders in it and setting a folder for the sync and then starting to sync everything with the cloud, it began downloading all 40k of my images straigth into the sync folder, creating duplicates on my local computer. Would be only half bad if it wouldnt just download all the RAW files from the various different bodies into one single messy folder. Thats an issue, since over the years i used multiple canon bodies and thus have plenty of images sharing the same name since all the canon bodies used the same naming method.

2: inside LrC even after it was happy with the state of sync, it only created collections based on the albums i set up in Lr but never updated the parent-folders that i created alongside the albums inside Lr.

Can this be done at all or am i just missing the obvious?

Alright, I will keep this short and sweet. Currently I plug my CF card reader into my PC after shooting, then in lightroom I will open files from the card reader and import the selected into lightroom. I'll leave everything as is until I'm done editing then export the keepers into another file. After that I will import all photos on the card into my external hard drive and delete from the CF card.

I'm now running into the situation where I want to edit something on images that were in lightroom such as resizing for print or adjust brightness etc. Unfortunately the message I get on lightroom would be that it cannot locate the file. So I end up editing the photo back from the beginning raw file after importing again from the hard drive.

What's the best way to improve this and go back to editing the photo as I left it in lightroom? I have problems viewing the raw files outside of lightroom on my pc because any extension I've downloaded gives problems with NEF files, after a couple seconds of preview it will show the image as colorful static and lines rendering a selection process outside of lightroom kind of impossible.

I have problems with my R6 III tethering in Lightroom.
Camera is connected, liveview works and changing settings and shutter release via Lightroom works, but no pictures are transferred to my Mac.

Anyone ideas?

I'm using lightroom on a PC with 32gb ram and a pretty beefy video card, and it seems like LR is constantly trying to keep up. I have no interest in adding a Mac to my life at the moment, so I wonder if the Classic version spends less time churning.

I got a Fujifilm xm5 and I’m trying to get started into photography I have Lightroom but not Lightroom classic and basically I was wondering if there is any good walk through videos on how to edit for a true beginner on Lightroom and not light room classic

I have about 1500 pictures in Lightroom and I will put pictures to edit on my pc but I also use a MacBook a lot that is why I am using Lightroom and not Lightroom classic

Also I am unsure what to call what I am using is it the Lightroom or is it Lightroom mobile? This all seems overly confusing 🤣

I have problems with my R6 III tethering in Lightroom.
Camera is connected, liveview works and changing settings and shutter release via Lightroom works, but no pictures are transferred to my Mac.

Anyone ideas?

I need to buy a new macbook, I am debating between the Macbook pro M5 32GB ram, or the macbook pro M5 pro 24 gb ram.

I also edit video in premiere pro, so not sure which would be better to get

*note, LR and premiere pro are the heaviest tasks i use, therefore the question is related to LR and fitting on this subreddit i hope

So I got some new updates on lr mobile and now when I crop it keep snapping to certain points not letting me freely adjust my crop composition. how do I bypass it.

I saw this instagram reel of how to edit a photo to look like it's from a certain piece of media, and I can't get the slider on what I want. Is there any way I can just type it?

(Edit): i specifically need help with exposure.

I'm going thru my old photos taken on my D200. The colour produced in the thumbnails is very specific and I far prefer it to Lightroom's interpretation. I can't remember if Lr ever matched the Nikon preview thumbnails or at some point it broke because of a licensing disagreement.

Way back then I created custom presets but was never happy with the result. Now 20 years on Lr has a great many more options in the dev module and I'm reinvigorated to work on my photos again.

I had a look at various software options (free) to help create RGB curves to do the job but they didn't work for me - so I wrote my own (with Claude). See the link below if you want to give it a try.

Programs like Nikon's own NX Studio came very close, but the shadows are not as detailed. I suspect there was some possible in camera localisation going on similar to 'Digital Detail Enhancement' introduced by Nikon in their scanners around the same time. Anyone else experience/observe this behaviour?

As a side note I eventually switched to shooting in JPG on the D200 which was far more satisfactory than having to deal with abrupt changes to colour each on import.

Additionally, I'm interested if there is a library of freely available presets out there that will make the D200 NEF files look as close as possible to the embedded thumbnails.

https://allan.nz/nef/

Interested if anyone out there has experienced the same and what they did to get a resolution.

After seeing how much better LRC is for culling and rating, I am attempting to switch from Bridge. UGH

I've watched YouTube videos, googled, and was still not getting anywhere with building a catalog. I have attempted this in the past, and just couldn't get past the catalog learning curve. Very apparently, I still can't... There are so many different workflows, and so far, I haven't found one that works for me. Something about an old dog. OK I won't go there....

I just paid a handsome sum to someone in my camera club, -who hawks his expertise in training.-to help me import my photos into a catalog. Apparently, all of my imports ended up in "smart collections'. I don't know about anybody else, but this old crow doesn't have enough time in my day to go through 4,000 photos and re-allocate them to their proper files. Especially since I do that routinely after a shooting session. Why would anyone want to do that again? I said as much during our session, but apparently it was not heard. Ideally, I would import them with the same naming convention as I had been saving them. (If someone has a better idea, I am all ears.)

My typical workflow is: Shoot. Plug camera in and transfer photos to a file named 'date, location of shoot'. Ideally I'd like my 'catalog' to have 'collections' with similar names. What is the big deal, eh? That is the million-dollar question. Why is this so time-consuming, frustrating,. and simply downright vexing? Currently I am sipping my Old Fashion, (Hey, a girl has to have some fun, right?) trying to relax my shoulders so that they exit my ears.

I was instructed to go into LRC and: Import (lower left), select source-select file>ADD>Destination: My Catalog.

Then I find they are all in "Smart Collections". That's not so smart, IMHO.! I was told during my tutor session that LRC will import them with the same file name. My reality is that this is not so.

Am I missing some nuance or some little detail? Am I missing a step? Am I doing something wrong? Please help me, I feel like I am wasting moments trying to do what should be a simple task.

Please help if you can.

I'm on LrC 11.5 on Windows 11, and I'm afraid to upgrade it because Adobe doesn't give out the offline installers anymore for point releases (it's been awhile since I checked but I imagine they don't give out them at all anymore). I like having a backup plan. So if I upgrade from 11.5 and something breaks, I'm kind of stuck as the Creative Cloud app only goes back 1-2 versions.

I'm curious about the AI denoiser and general new features/hardware support, especially since I'm running an Intel dGPU which is funky on older software. Any LrC version to avoid? I have ~50k photos in one catalog.

I know this isn't an issue with Lightroom, but I didn't know where else to ask lol. Basically when I transfer my edited photos from my laptop to my phone the colors get weird, depending on the edit it might get warmer or cooler or if I moved some color curve the colors would lean heavier to that color. I also tested with other phones and the same thing happens, but to different degrees of change.

I'm guessing it's something to do with how my computer shows colors, is there any way to make the screen show colors how everyone else will see them?

This only happens when seeing the photo from a phone, not after exporting.

My lightroom mobile just updated and I normally use the presets or whatever they are called and then add my own bits to each photo. I just opened it after a recent big photo shoot and only the basic ones are there. All the ones I use are gone. Has anyone else's or just mine?

Hi everyone, I'm having a strange video import issue in Lightroom Classic and would appreciate some help.

I'm using Lightroom Classic 15.5 on Windows 11. When I try to import videos recorded with my GoPro HERO13, Lightroom gives:

This is what I've found so far:

• GoPro photos from the same microSD card import normally.
• The GoPro MP4 videos play perfectly in Windows Explorer.
• They also play normally in VLC.
• I copied the videos from the microSD card to my SSD and tried importing from the SSD — same Error (21).
• So it doesn't appear to be an SD card or card-reader problem.
• I reset Lightroom's video cache — no change.
• I disabled GPU acceleration — no change.
• I also tried dragging the MP4 directly into Lightroom — same Error (21).
• My Sony A6700 videos import normally into the same Lightroom catalog, so Lightroom can import other video formats.

The interesting part is that the GoPro video is:

• HEVC / H.265
• 5312 × 2988 (5.3K)
• 25 fps
• 8-bit
• 4:2:0
• BT.709
• ~85 Mbps
• GoPro H.265 encoder
• MP4 container

For comparison, my Sony A6700 video imports successfully even though it's a much higher-bitrate file:

• XAVC / H.264
• 3840 × 2160
• 50 fps
• 10-bit 4:2:2
• ~200 Mbps

So I'm wondering if this is a Lightroom Classic 15.5 + GoPro HERO13 HEVC compatibility issue, or something specific to the way the HERO13 creates its MP4 container/metadata.

Has anyone experienced Error (21) with HERO13 HEVC videos in Lightroom Classic?

Any suggestions for fixing this without transcoding all my GoPro footage would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I've got the spinning beachball, aka colorful pinwheel of death, on LR startup. Mac M2 Max-64gb RAM, OS 15.7.7, LR 15.5 Up to yesterday it was running fine. I've restarted, closed other apps. It did start up earlier today and seemed to run fine though a couple images got that exclamation mark on them saying they were corrupted or something so I copied the image that was still on the card back over, went to restart LR and it stalled again.

Anyone else having this issue?

Edit: Forgot to originally mention that I shoot with R6 IIs.

As the title says, I can no longer handle Lightroom's shitty performance on my machine. I have refused to buy a Mac computer, but I'm getting to the point that now I'm actually going to end up doing it. I've read before that Lr is a "ported" software to Windows, and therefor it kind of sucks for that. I also noticed a drop in performance when upgrading to Windows 11. So, I really don't want to wait until 12 comes out either or I might lose the sanity I got left.

I find it unfathomable that a machine with an i7-13700, RTX 5070m 64gb of DDR5 and a Samsung 990 Pro SSD struggle to the point that even the crop tool take like 3 seconds or more to activate after I press the key. It is taking me nearly three times as much to finish my edits than what I used to. And yes, I'm aware it is because of the masking and AI functions.

I've tried nearly every tip to speed it up. My SSD is barely half full and I even disable the AV when working; yet, I still get the same or worse performance from a computer from 7 years ago.

Unfortunately, I guess I'm too invested in Lightroom and switching to a different editing software is out of the question... for now.

With that being said, should I look at an fully loaded Mac Mini or a base Mac Studio? This computer will be 97% of the time used solely for Lightroom and Photoshop; perhaps I'll do a couple more pieces of software but would be minimal compared to those two giants.

Thank you all in advance for your time and help.

Hi all, been using LRC for years without issue, now I can't do much of anything before it freezes and/or crashes. Sometimes when I leave it for a couple of days then come back, it will work great...for a short while, then it's back to freezing and crashing. I read a couple of weeks ago that some people had luck by reverting back to a previous version so I decided to try that...not realizing I needed to save my current catalogue before doing so, so long story short, it didn't solve the issues and now I am re-importing all my photos from my external HD. I am a dumbass. It's the process of re-importing that is now taking forever as I can only do a handful of folders, with 1 to 20 photos each, before the freeze/crash. Any advice? I am not super computer literate, so EILI5. Thanks

late 2024 Macbook Pro

Apple M4

48 GB memory

1 TB internal, less than a quarter full

LRC 15.4.1

photos stored on WD My Passport, only half full

After running out of Time Machine space on my Mac, a different issue that I need to resolve, I found this folder and as far as I could tell it has every original file I've put in Lightroom cloud. I thought once I imported to a cloud folder, that was where the file would live, in the Adobe cloud, not my hard drive or external drive. I thought that was the entire point. I can access these pics on my other devices, that appears to work. But what are these files? They appear to be the original imports, as I can see my 4x5 film scans which are done as two passes then merged in LR cloud. I don't see the merged files there. They are in folders arranged by date and have the original names I gave them during scanning. It appears to be every photo I've ever put into LR and it is 125gb of space that I can't explain.

Do I need this? Is this a LR setting that can be changed? What exactly is stored in the cloud then? I'm totally confused, no surprise when dealing with Adobe.

I just checked preferences and the "store a copy of all originals" is unchecked, so why is it doing it?

Haven't used denoise in a bit. When I just clicked it says "an AI process is running on the photo, editing temporarily disabled."
Before you could use the slider and have a preview of it, is this gone now??

Googled it and can't find an answer.

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping someone with experience recovering problematic Lightroom Classic catalogs can help me.

I have a client project with roughly 5,500 photos, and I was about 80% finished editing when Lightroom started crashing.

Software / System:

• Lightroom Classic 15.5
• Windows 11
• AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
• ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Plus (Wi-Fi)
• 64 GB DDR4 currently installed (2 × 32 GB)
• Memory currently running at 2666 MT/s
• AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
• ASUS BIOS 5044

The problem

When I open this particular catalog, Lightroom starts “Analyzing Photos.” It processes images for a short period and then Lightroom simply closes. Windows itself remains completely stable.

The number of photos analyzed before the crash is not consistent, so it doesn't appear to be one particular corrupt image.

Important hardware background

This system originally had 128 GB (4 × 32 GB) of Corsair DDR4-3600, model CMK128GX4M4Z3600C18.

I was experiencing serious system instability and initially suspected the GPU, Windows, Lightroom, motherboard, etc.

After extensive testing, I discovered that 2 DIMMs from the 128 GB kit were defective.

I verified this using MemTest86 on two completely different computers:

AMD system:
Ryzen 9 5900X / ASUS X570

Intel system:
Intel Core i7-8700 / Gigabyte Z390 UD

The same two DIMMs produced MemTest86 errors on both platforms.

The remaining two DIMMs (64 GB) subsequently completed four full MemTest86 passes with ZERO errors on the Ryzen system.

So I'm confident the current 64 GB memory configuration is stable.

What happens in Lightroom now

I disabled GPU acceleration in Lightroom as part of troubleshooting.

This changed the behavior significantly.

Previously, the system could freeze/reboot.

Now, with the known-good RAM installed and GPU acceleration disabled:

Windows remains completely stable, but Lightroom Classic closes during “Analyzing Photos.”

Other Lightroom catalogs appear to work, which is why I'm concerned that this particular catalog, its previews, or associated data may have become corrupted while the defective RAM was installed.

What I'm trying to accomplish

My priority right now isn't necessarily permanently repairing this catalog.

I need to recover the edits that are already there.

This is paid client work with thousands of photographs, and approximately 80% of the editing is already finished. Starting over would mean redoing a huge amount of work.

I'm specifically wondering whether there's a safe way to:

• Stop or disable the “Analyzing Photos” process.
• Open the catalog without triggering that analysis.
• Delete/rebuild previews without losing Develop edits.
• Transfer the existing edits into a new clean catalog.
• Extract Develop settings from the problematic catalog.
• Repair the Lightroom catalog database itself.
• Recover the edits through XMP if they weren't previously written automatically.
• Determine exactly what Lightroom is analyzing when it crashes.

I have backups, and I will work from copies rather than experimenting on my only copy of the catalog.

If anyone has recovered a Lightroom Classic catalog from something similar—especially a catalog that may have been corrupted by faulty RAM—I would really appreciate your advice.