Light­room 3 is a great pro­gram to orga­nize your pho­tos and is an excel­lent tool for edit­ing your pho­tographs. But, if you have an older com­puter sys­tem like I had, Light­room 3 can get a bit slug­gish. Here are a few things I found that can help.

Opti­mize Catalog

After a while using Light­room you may notice that Light­room is run­ning a lit­tle slower than usual. By opti­miz­ing your cat­a­log you can fix this prob­lem eas­ily. To do this go to the top and select file then select Opti­mize Cat­a­log. Now you will get the Opti­mize Cat­a­log dia­log box.(See Below) Now select Opti­mize Cat­a­log. This will take a few min­utes depend­ing on the size your cat­a­log. You will not be able use Light­room dur­ing this period.

Card Read­ers

When upload­ing pho­tographs use a card reader rather than directly from your cam­era and use a card reader that uses USB2 or USB3, if avail­able. This way the upload is notice­ably faster.

TIFF rather than PSD

For exter­nal edit­ing use TIFF rather than PSD file for­mat. TIFF files process faster than PSD files. To set this up, go to the top and select Edit then Pref­er­ences. This will bring up the Pref­er­ences dia­log box.(See Below) At the top of the Pref­er­ences dia­log box select Exter­nal Edit­ing. Go to the drop down box File For­mat and select TIFF. These are a few of the other set­ting I use. In the Color Space select Prophoto RGB. In the Bit Space select 16-bit/component. Set Res­o­lu­tion to 300. Finally, set Com­pres­sion to None. Then press OK at the bot­tom when fin­ished to save the changes.

Trash Bin

Empty your Trash Bin often. Light­room cre­ates a lot of extra files. Do this and it will keep your sys­tem clean.

Uncheck Auto­mat­i­cally write to changes in XMP

To do this go to the top and select Edit then select Cat­a­log Set­tings. The Cat­a­log Set­tings dia­log box will now appear.(See Below) Select Meta­data at the top. Uncheck the box marked Auto­mat­i­cally right to changes in XMP. Then press OK. Please Note: This will dis­able the cat­a­log from sav­ing any changes you make in the cat­a­log from updat­ing the XMP Side­car file. But it does improve speed. After you have mod­i­fied a group of pho­tographs, you can man­u­ally save to the XMP Side­car file. Select all the pho­tos that you are work­ing on and press Con­trol and then S to save the data to your XMP Side­car file. This way other pro­grams that use the XMP file can rec­og­nize the changes you made. Then press OK at the bot­tom when fin­ished to save the changes.

Change the cam­era raw cache settings

To do this first select Edit. Then select Pref­er­ences. You will now see the Pref­er­ences dia­log box.(See Below) Go to the bot­tom of the dia­log box and change the default from 1 GB to a higher num­ber like, 10, 25 or even 50 GB. I use 25 GB. Cam­era cache is used to store the image pre­views. By increas­ing the cache size it allows you to store more pre­views. This will increase your speed of mov­ing between pho­tographs. Then press OK at the bot­tom when fin­ished to save the changes.

Build Pre­views

To help speed up your photo edit­ing we are going to select a group of pho­tos and have Light­room cre­ate pre­views for that whole group of pho­tos. This will allow you to move from photo to photo in a shorter period of time. In the Library sec­tion first select a folder or group of pho­tos. Don’t select the whole cat­a­log, as this could take a lot of time to process and is not nec­es­sary. To do this at the top select Library then Pre­views then select Ren­ders Stan­dard Size Pre­views. A dia­log box will appear and then choose Build All. This will build pre­views for all the pho­tos you selected. Now when you go and access each one of those pho­tographs they will pop up much faster and not need to build pre­view each time you select it.

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Com­puter Upgrades

Here are few upgrades you can per­form on your com­puter that may improve the per­for­mance also:

Use a faster hard drive — This will improve your over sys­tem performance.

Add RAM of 8GB or more. Light­room uses a lot of mem­ory. so this will help with Light­room performance.

Con­clu­sion

If these steps don’t help enough it may be time for a new com­puter. In the next arti­cle I will be build­ing a new com­puter with the new Intel Core I7 2600K Proces­sor to super­charge the per­for­mance for Light­room 3 and video editing.