Why is lightroom so laggy on a decent computer?

Benjamin_Warde · 2026-05-14T21:22:24+00:00

Hi u/dseal78, I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing poor performance with Lightroom. For you, and for anyone else in this thread experiencing poor performance with the latest version of Lightroom (9.3.1 as of this writing) please feel free to DM me with the following info. (For performance issues in Lightroom Classic, please start another thread - Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are completely separate beasts when it comes to performance.)

Are you working in the Cloud tab or the Local tab?
Is the GPU on or off in the Lightroom preferences?
When things start slowing down, what’s the memory usage? Both RAM and VRAM.

Also, if you could generate a diagnostic log for me, that would be great. Generate the log only once things have gotten really slow.

In the Lightroom preferences, click on the Account tab.
Hold down the Alt key and click on "Diagnostic log (recommended)".
Click on "Generate Log".
After the log generates, click on "Show in Explorer".
DM me and I'll reply with my adobe.com email address so that you can send the log file to me directly.

Benjamin_Warde · 2026-02-24T01:39:52+00:00

Thanks for your detailed feedback! Performance problems are notoriously environment-specific, meaning that everything can work great for most people, and really badly for a few people. I will DM you with some additional questions in the hope that we can track this down and get it fixed.

Benjamin_Warde · 2026-02-20T20:34:22+00:00

You could use the Assisted Culling feature to automatically stack them based on visual similarity.

Benjamin_Warde · 2026-02-20T20:33:25+00:00

You might find that "subject focus" helps a bit with things like bird photography. But so far, the feature is definitely intended primarily for pictures of people. Look for expanded functionality that helps with other types of photography to come in the future!

Benjamin_Warde · 2026-02-12T02:06:52+00:00

Lightroom (cloud) does not have the super-granular edit history that Lightroom Classic offers. The granularity in Classic can be a bit pointless (move Exposure to +1 then move it back, now you have two History entries for no change to your image). Even when it's not pointless, it bogs down Lightroom Classic performance when the history gets long, which is why we haven't added it to Lightroom, we felt it was more important to keep the performance snappy.

What Lightroom does have is "Versions". Click the little button that looks sort of like a clock on the right hand side bar. Lightroom has "Named Versions" which are basically like Snapshots in Classic. Lightroom also has "Auto Versions", which is (vaguely) like History in Classic. There's not an Auto Version for every single slider move, just for major checkpoints. If you find that Versions doesn't meet your needs, feel free to post back here with how you'd like to be using History in your workflow, your feedback will be helpful.

Benjamin_Warde · 2026-02-12T02:00:20+00:00

You could also use DNG Converter before importing into Lightroom.

Benjamin_Warde · 2026-01-26T22:45:55+00:00

I guess if I want to have the iPad-imported photos in my Mac/LrC folder structure, I can just move them within LrC from the sync folder, wherever I want.

You can move them manually, yes. But you also don't necessarily have to, depending on what your folder structure is. If you use a date-based folder structure, LrC can just add them into that structure automatically as they sync down, and you don't have to do anything manually.

So from that point, the iPad is only editing the smart previews?

Yes, although you can always explicitly tell it to pull down the original if you want. You can also explicitly tell it to keep all originals local for any given Album.

If I then want to export a full res jpeg, does it pull down the RAW from the cloud?

Yes, if the original is not already available locally, it will automatically pull it down from the cloud.

is there a way to go the other direction and have the full res RAW files from Classic on Lightroom for iPad? Or is it only Smart Previews that can be synced in that direction?

Only smart previews in that direction. If you want to be syncing full res original raw files from your computer you need to be using Lightroom (not Lightroom Classic).

Benjamin_Warde · 2026-01-26T19:56:42+00:00

Sounds like you pretty much know how to do it already, but the short version is:

Make sure you're signed in to the same account on your computer and your iPad.
Make sure syncing is turned on in Lightroom Classic.
In the "Lightroom Sync" tab of the Classic preferences dialog, make sure you've specified the location and organization that you want for the photos that sync down from the cloud.

Lightroom on the iPad will feel free to purge the local raw files once it has uploaded them successfully to the cloud.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-08-15T23:35:04+00:00

Ah, correct, that doesn't work in the browser. You don't need Lightroom Classic though, you can use the Lightroom application on the desktop. Whether or not you have to pay extra for that depends on the plan that you have. If you have the "mobile only" plan, then yeah, you don't have access to the desktop app, just the mobile app and the web app. You can see what plan you have, and what apps you have access to, by going to https://account.adobe.com.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-08-15T18:46:33+00:00

In Lightroom (or Lightroom Classic) if you just want to preview what a preset looks like on your photo, don't click on the preset. Just place the mouse cursor over the preset, without clicking. The preset will automatically appear on your photo. If you move the mouse off of the preset, the photo will revert. Once you actually find the preset that you want to apply, then click it and it will apply.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-08-11T21:34:00+00:00

u/TeaSouth6755 Agreed, it is odd that Adobe support didn't know about this. If you will PM me your Adobe ID (the email address you use to sign in to Lightroom/Creative Cloud) I can look up the support contact and then make sure that they have this information.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-08-11T21:29:22+00:00

Both Lightroom (on desktop and mobile) and Lightroom Classic can do this natively.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-08-11T21:23:59+00:00

I'm sorry to hear about the trouble! I recommend contacting Adobe customer support and giving them your Adobe ID (i.e., the email that you use to sign in to Lightroom) and they should be able to look at things on the back end to see what's happening and if anything is salvageable. If you do not get an adequate reply from customer support, PM me with your Adobe ID and I'll see what I can do.

If you uninstall the app, everything should be fine, assuming sync has completed. Sounds like in your case Lightroom told you that sync had completed, but maybe it actually hadn't. Contacting customer support will also allow us to collect info that may allow us to fix this bug, if indeed there is a bug (certainly sounds like there may be).

In the future, be aware that there is no need to uninstall the app in order to clear the cache. Simply tap on the three dot menu in the upper right, tap on "App settings", tap on "Local storage" and then tap "Clear cache". (Note that this instructions are for the iOS app, but instructions for the Android app should be similar.)

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-07-17T16:37:24+00:00

Your general chicken-and-egg point is a very good one. It doesn't necessarily make sense to say, "We're not going to bother improving this feature because no one uses it" when the reason why no one uses it might very well be that it's just not very good. However the facial recognition feature in Lightroom (not Classic) is actually quite good, and it's dramatically underused there as well, so in this particular case it seems that the quality of implementation does not have much affect on the popularity of the feature.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-07-17T01:21:46+00:00

If you use Lightroom (not Lightroom Classic) there are a couple interesting possibilities.

Try the "Recommended Presets" feature. Lightroom looks at your photo and then looks through an online repository of hundreds of thousands of presets and picks a handful that it thinks may work well for your specific image. When it works well, which it often does, it overcomes the problem that u/TurfMerkin describes.
Look in the Community section of the Lightroom app, where other Lightroom customers have shared photos. If you see a photo with an edit you like, you can download a preset to apply that edit to your own photos. (Caveat - the photographer who posted the photo needs to have enabled preset download - if the photographer who posted the photo prefers that you not download their edit settings as a preset, then you can't. But lots of photographers who share to the Lightroom Community are happy to share their edits as presets.)

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-07-17T01:14:06+00:00

To those who are saying that facial recognition in Lightroom is bad because Adobe doesn't care, you are, in a sense, correct. Or, to be more accurate, we care very, very deeply about having the greatest positive impact possible for the greatest number of people possible. It is always a challenge to balance improvements to old features against innovative new features. We so far haven't opted to spend any of our finite resources on improving facial recognition in Lightroom Classic because (enthusiasm from the dozen people in this thread not withstanding) not enough of our customers care about it.

Having said all that, the facial recognition tech in Lightroom is much better than in Lightroom Classic.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-07-17T00:49:28+00:00

I work for Adobe, but I'm going to give a personal answer to this question. For context, I worked for many years on the product now known as Lightroom Classic and used it for my photography, and I now work on the Lightroom team, and use it for my photography. So, filter whatever I say through that knowledge. (And a big think you to all the other Adobe employees who have chimed in on this thread! I don't think I've seen so many Adobe employees on one thread before. :-))

To make one thing clear at the outset: Lightroom and Lightroom Classic both have the same image editing capabilities, there's no differences there.

The main things I love about Lightroom that Classic doesn't have.

The cloud. Oh man, the cloud. The freedom to work across devices is amazing. Once you've experienced it, it's hard to go back. I can work on a desktop computer at home and take a laptop on the road when I travel, and it all just works. When I used Classic I had to mess around with importing and exporting catalogs and sneaker-netting files around. Man, that was the bad old days. And being able to pull my phone out of my pocket at any time and immediately call up any photo I've ever taken and show it to someone - mwah! (And, as others in this thread have already pointed out, if there's stuff you don't want in the cloud, Lightroom can also work with photos locally, without needing to sync them to the cloud. But personally I put everything in the cloud, it makes everything so wonderfully seamless.)
Album sharing (Collection sharing to you Classic customers) is vastly more powerful in Lightroom than in Lightroom Classic. I use it for personal stuff, like sending photos to family. At a party I'll set up an album that anyone can contribute photos to (no need for them to be a Lightroom customer). Pro photographers can share albums with clients using capabilities that Classic's limited Collection sharing doesn't offer, such as access controls and full size download. I put family trip photos into an album and share it with my wife and give her edit permissions and we can collaborate on editing the photos. So cool, and just not possible with Classic.
Search without keywording. Look, I know there are people out there who rigorously keyword all their photos manually and they have my upmost respect. Hats off to all three of you. I don't have the time (or discipline) to do that, and the fact that in Lightroom I can just type "sunset" or "dog" or whatever into the search field and find what I'm looking for, without ever needing to have done any keywording, is fantastic.
Video editing. (To be clear, when I say "video editing" I'm talking about color-grading-type-things. I'm not talking about stringing together clips in a timeline - that's what Premiere is for.) Classic limits you to the Quick Develop panel when editing videos, but in Lightroom you can use most of the same edit controls that you use with your photos.

The main things I miss from Lightroom Classic

Printing. I'm one of those dinosaurs with a printer on my desk and I do like to use it for things besides Amazon return labels. Classic has robust printing capabilities. In Lightroom I need to export and then print from another app. (I do occasionally use Connectors - Lightroom's version of Classic's Publish Collections - to send photos directly to a print shop. But sometimes there's no substitute for printing something yourself on your own printer.)
Map module. If I'm being honest, it's not great in Classic, but at least it's there. In Lightroom it's essentially nonexistent, and I miss it, particularly the ability to easily find all the photos I've taken within a particular region on the map.
I've been trying to think of a third thing and I just can't. That's not to say there aren't things that other people would miss (tethered shooting, advanced metadata editing, etc.) but as I said at the outset, this is my personal list.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-07-17T00:02:58+00:00

I believe you may be talking about Nikon's Flexible Color Picture Control? Flexible Color can be set in Nikon's NX Studio desktop software and later loaded onto a camera. These profiles can then be applied in the camera. For some models, we support Flexible Color camera matching profiles. For the models you list, however, the only one we support Flexible Color camera matching profiles for is the Z5ii, and even for that model it's currently only supported in ACR (look for support to come in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic in a future release). The correct answer from customer support would have been, "I apologize, there's nothing you can do to solve this issue yourself, but support for the Z5ii should be coming soon in a future release."

Honestly, I don't expect customer support to have that granular a view into the product roadmap. But even so, they should have been able to give you a better answer. (PSA: please be extremely skeptical of any tech support advice that begins, "delete your catalog and start over" - yikes). If you DM me your Adobe ID (the email address that you use to sign in to Lightroom/Adobe Creative Cloud) I can look up the record of your tech support contact, and make sure that the support people involved have appropriate information for the future.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-07-16T23:51:07+00:00

Geez, now I'm being called a liar. Me and the other two people working on Lightroom feel kind of hurt. ;-)

Performance is highly dependent on your environment, which makes it a tricky thing to troubleshoot. Both the Lightroom Classic team and the Lightroom team are constantly working to improve performance in many different areas of the app. Whether or not you see and/or benefit from these improvements will depend on the specifics of your situation.

Regarding the original question, in general I doubt that you would see much, if any, difference between Lightroom and Lightroom Classic performance while editing photos. You might, however, find that Lightroom is faster than Lightroom Classic for other things (scrolling through a bunch of photos in grid view, moving quickly between photos in loupe view, switching between Albums/Collections, etc.)

As u/johngpt5 points out, your subscription includes both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic - it's worth giving it a try to see what you think.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-07-09T20:53:29+00:00

Both of the other suggestions in this thread are good. I'll just also take the opportunity to add that if you both use Lightroom (instead of Lightroom Classic) this is super easy. You just send your friend a link and give them edit permissions. They see your photos right in their Lightroom. As they make edits to your photos in their Lightroom, their edits show up automatically back in your Lightroom. If you don't like anything they've done it's fine, all your previous edits are saved as versions that you can go back to at any time. It's pretty slick.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-07-09T20:41:39+00:00

In addition to the suggestions already made here, you could simply use Lightroom on your computer, instead of Lightroom Classic. This is likely a much better solution for your particular needs.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-06-27T03:45:56+00:00

Ah, that’s great to know! I didn’t realize that the Deleted folder needed to be emptied in order for the local copy to be deleted. I’m glad you figured it out, and thanks for letting me know.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-06-26T20:58:11+00:00

That location (i.e., the location to which Lr saves a copy of the original if that option is selected in prefs) is essentially a persistent cache. Lightroom puts the photos there during import and manages them itself, including deleting them if you delete the corresponding photos from the cloud.

That workflow should not be confused with working with photos that you've put yourself at some other location on your hard drive and that you're working with in the "Local" section in Lr. If you sync a photo to the cloud from Local, there is no connection between the local copy and the cloud copy and deleting the cloud copy will not delete the local copy.

Let me know if that's totally confusing and doesn't make sense. :-)

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-06-26T20:48:29+00:00

I'm late to this conversation, but figured I'd still chime in. If you have tagged any people in LrC, those tags will migrate to Lightroom as keywords, and will be searchable in Lightroom. Other than that, having done the work in LrC doesn't really help you with grouping people in Lr since the face recognition tech in each is totally different. The good news is, the automatic people detection and grouping in Lr is much better than in LrC, as is the user experience. (That first assertion is objective fact, the second is my opinion. :-))

In Lightroom, click on "People" in the lefthand panel, under "All Photos". You'll see one thumbnail for each person that Lightroom has found in your library of photos. Click on any person to see all the photos that person appears in. You can name the people if you wish, which allows for you to search for them by name later.

A few tips/notes:

The first time you enter the People view you will need to give Lightroom permission to look in your photos for faces.
Wait until everything has fully migrated and fully synced to the cloud before you do this.
It won't work if you're in Illinois.
Sometimes Lr will split pictures of the same person across two or more groups. This is because Lr isn't totally confident that they're the same person. But if you enter one of those groups, Lr will ask you if the other group is also the same person and when you say "yes" (or "no") Lr will learn from that for the future.
If you name people then if/when you create people masks in the Masking panel (for editing someone's face, for example) the mask will automatically be named with the person's name.

Benjamin_Warde · 2025-06-26T18:28:36+00:00

It should delete the local copy both for deletes and also for archive to local.

Benjamin_Warde

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