Hey everyone! I hope you’re having a great week. This time around, I wanted to share a few tips I have for speeding up Lightroom. I hear a lot of questions on the topic, so I figured I’d give you some best practices to help squeeze as much juice out as you can.
I love teaching and photography... In that order. I feel that enjoying photography, and photo editing can get WAY too complicated. So my personal mission (and favorite thing to do), is to create education that simplifies the process of taking great photos, and how to edit them to get the results you’ve always wanted.
Hi Matt
I just saw this video. I have a question which I think was partially answered in one of the threads. Is the reason why you don’t need to write in the xmp file because LR stores all the edits in the library?
So the only real consideration is if you want to work on the file outside of LR, then writing to xmp file is important?
Thanks!
Yep. LR stores it all in its library. And writing to XMP would only help if you wanted to open that raw file in Photoshop. No other program will read LR’s changes so the XMP won’t really do much for you.
Always learn something from your tips and videos Matt, Thanks so much!
Matt, is turning off Automatically Write Settings into XMP a good idea? Won’t this interfere with opening Lr files in Photoshop?
Hi Bert. Yes it’s a good idea. The only time it interferes is if you open a file directly from your drive in to Photoshop and wanted your LR settings. That’s not a problem for me since I use LR and I start there. But if you find your do it all the time, them maybe turn it on. Just know you take a performance hit with it on. Thx!
Matt, on the same topic, what about saving LR edits when starting in LR and then opening that image in One1 Photo RAW? Just curious! Thanks!
Hi David. If you’re in LR, you can go to Photo > Edit In and edit in ON1 Effects. But LR and ON1 (or any other raw editor out there) doesn’t share raw edits. So there’s no way (other than rendering your photo to a JPG or PSD or TIFF), to get your LR edits in ON1 or vice versa.
Thanks Matt!
Hi Mat, I have Lightroom CC (Classic, on an iMac) and have it set to do a weekly backup, as part of which it optimises the catalogue every time, so no need to do a manual optimisation (however you do need to go into the backup folder occasionally and manually delete the older backups as they take up a bit of space – I usually keep the two newest as a precaution, and they are also backed up to a separate hard drive along with all my photos).
With regard to performance, I am getting low on free space on my Macbook Pro internal drive. Could performance be improved by putting the Photoshop scratch disk on an external drive? If so, how to you do this? I have looked in preferences and cannot find where this can be done.
I thank you for your answer in advance.
Hi. It’s possible that could help. You can set it in Photoshop Preferences > Scratch Disks area.
Matt, as always, your tips are great. About building previews: Why not build 1:1 previews? I know it takes longer, but wouldn’t that be faster when reviewing?
Hey Eric – that’s not the way it works. Because they’re “not” full 1:1 previews is what makes it faster.
thanks, Matt. that makes sense.
As always – excellent tips. Thanks
Hi Matt,
Thank you for the video. I noticed you’re using an iMac. Out of curiosity, do you know if adding more then 16GB of RAM improves Lightroom CC (Classic) performance? I’ve monitored my “Memory Pressure” under various load conditions and it doesn’t appear with Lightroom and Photoshop open that I have any “pressure”. Just curious what your findings are.
Thanks,
Mark
To Mark: I have an iMac with 24Gb of Ram and a Macbook Air with 8 Gb of Ram and there is not a lot of difference in performance in LR Classic. There probably is some difference but not so I notice.
Peter
Hi Mark. I have 64GB. I do some video editing on it and max’d it out (aftermarket) when I bought the iMac. I can’t say it helps or not though. It’s really tough and I’d only know if I did a comparison before/after (but I didn’t) 🙂
Matt, thanks for these great tips. I’ll see whether my Mac needs this kick in the pants.
How to embedded a photo already imported in the lightroom catalog?
Hi. There isn’t a way to do that.
Thanks
Thanks Matt,
On a related, but slightly different note, do you have any experience with how resilient the Lightroom catalogue is with respect to moving image files around a lot (inside Lightroom)? I’m considering a workflow where I would import new images to a SSD-drive, and then, when done editing them, move them (inside Lightroom)to a normal disk drive for long term storage. The catalogue would be on another SSD-drive. Any thoughts on that?
Hi. It shouldn’t affect anything or it’s “resiliency” 🙂
FWIW, I’ve been doing something along those lines for years with no ill effects. The thing I think I always forget is, really, the catalog is mostly a list of “pointers” to things, not really things, so as long as you let it move the things and keep track of them, it doesn’t really effect it.
What is the difference between embedded and sidecar and standard?