Very slow import with Lightroom Classic

I recently upgraded to Lightroom Classic and the import of .ARW files has become very slow. Mac 10.12.6 on retina display mid 2012 MacBook Pro. Drag and drop files from card to external drive happens at 3GB/minute. Import same files into Lightroom Classic is 0.36 GB/minute.

 

Suggestions?

 

Thanks

Have you checked to see what, if any, default import settings are being used?

I have toggled various default settings on and off without much effect.

Can't say whether it is any slower than normal - I've pretty much given up on LR because of the slowness of the import. What's the point of taking hours to import thousands of images only to either cull most of them or only process 10% of them? I don't understand the need to pre-create all the previews (at least Nikon RAW files have a perfectly usable JPEG embedded and the 1:1 preview of the ones I select could easily be created on the fly. LR was supposed to become my PS alternative to avoid the subscription but since I have caved on that, LR has no real reason for being on my computer at all.

You can select LR to not create a 1:1 preview on import (under preferences I think).

I am intrigued why this is a problem? I just start it off and come back in half an hour. I just do something else. This is the price you pay for also having a database (library) of your images created automatically.

You can select LR to not create a 1:1 preview on import (under preferences I think)

I know. The option missing is to not create a preview at all.

 

This is the price you pay for also having a database (library) of your images created automatically.

Not willing to pay that price as I have no need for such a database - all I want is a RAW converter and a certain level of post-processing capabilities. As I mentioned, I did purchase LR to avoid the subscription model for PS; I did not buy it for its database features. Turns out I can't avoid the time waste of the catalog even though I delete it when I am done with processing. I clearly picked the wrong software to replace ACR/photoshop with.

The Lightroom Queen, Victoria Bampton, will have a new book out on the new Lightroom versions in about 2 weeks. In the meantime you might try going to her website and asking in the forum there.

There are many more to come until you change into Lightroom CC. That is the Adobe's Idea.

I just start it off and come back in half an hour. I just do something else.

 

It's simpler than that, you can start processing as soon as images show up. I edit within a minute or two of starting import.

 

Also, I don't find import slower, seems a little faster. Check how the previews are set.

The slow part is probably the creation of standard thumbnails, not the actual import. You always get a low resolution thumbnail, by which you can recognize an image. If you click on the thumbnail, a full thumbnail will be generated on a priority basis.

I don't find LR import particularly slow either, certainly no slower than it was when I had a 10 MP files.

I recently upgraded to Lightroom Classic and the import of .ARW files has become very slow. Mac 10.12.6 on retina display mid 2012 MacBook Pro. Drag and drop files from card to external drive happens at 3GB/minute. Import same files into Lightroom Classic is 0.36 GB/minute.

 

Suggestions?

 

Thanks

A bit OT but how do you measure that speed of transport? I am also on OSX, 10.9.5, and though import into LR (6.13) was somewhat slow, when I upgraded to a Nikon d810, with its larger files, other import issues appeared- discussed in another thread here.

TIA

I haven't noticed it - generally, Lightroom Classic (LR 7) is significantly faster on my computer than LR CC/6 was. At the same time, I do have the LR catalog and previews on a solid-state drive, I've got 16GB of RAM, and a 6-core Intel Skylake-X. ,I've turned off GPU acceleration in Lightroom, because when I'm editing in Photoshop from LR, having both using GPU offload causes display and UI issues in lightroom (nvidia 1080, did it on my old computer with a much older nvidia gpu in it). Computer was actually built to run the kids' games. My main point is that LR Classic isn't generally slower, but it could be in your case.

 

You could try resetting lightroom back to default settings to make sure you don't have a problem there. It's a pain, but you could back the existing settings up first so you can put them back if it doesn't help.

 

Are you using the built-in card reader? Isn't that USB 2? Maybe try a third-party USB card reader to make sure the reader isn't having a problem. Or plug the camera straight in and try that.

 

Finally, did you upgrade MacOS to High Sierra by any chance? I don't believe it converts you to the new file system on upgrade unless you have an SSD. I've also generally found that El Capitan, Sierra and High Sierra have had increasingly worse disk io on older Macs lacking SSD or Fusion drives. I maintain the digital lab used by a university art department, and it was getting pretty painful until we upgraded the computers recently. It's possible that Lightroom Classic is doing something on the file system (multithreaded) that isn't performing well with a newer OS on older hardware.

 

Maybe run Activity Monitor during an import - look at memory use, CPU use and Disk use to see where the bottleneck might be. LR Classic did introduce some substantial catalog changes - including compressing some data inside the catalog to lower the amount of data being written to and read from disk. Depending on your system and load, maybe the extra overhead is causing a problem? Seems unlikely, but Activity Monitor could tease that out.

 

As someone else mentioned, you could render previews as a different step. If it looks like you're CPU or disk constrained, that might be worth a try.

Mac notebooks use the USB bus for the SD card slot. It will be the same as your USB connectors, a MacBook Pro 2012 should be USB3.