Programs like Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premier, and other video editing programs such as DaVinci Resolve, can all run slow for a variety of reasons. Even though we think computers should be able to access information instantaneously, they actually can’t. Every operation takes time, and if your computer isn’t setup correctly, the time can add up to perceivable slowness. So, if you’re using image or video editing software of any kind, the suggestions in this post should be able to help you.
The first possibility is that your computer does not have enough RAM. A good place to start for photo and video editing is at 16GB of memory for your computer. 16GB should allow enough memory to do basic video editing and typical photo editing.
Having more memory never hurts but the law of diminishing returns kicks in very quickly with memory. Many people assume that if you have say 64GB of memory its going to make everything faster. Well, it won’t make everything faster but it will make some things faster. More memory will allow you to do more multi-tasking on your system, and it may also allow you to work with larger files more fluidly, but its not going to get the data off of your hard disk drive or solid state drive any faster.
One situation where a lot of memory can be benficial is when working with very large panoramas or high resolution photos with multiple layers in Photoshop or similar programs. Layers in particular tend to be very memory intensive and if your computer can’t put enough data into memory the slowdown will be noticeable.
While increased memory can help with video editing as well, you will need a LOT of memory to see a big difference there. For 4k 60fps video you’ll probably want at least 128GB of system memory if you plan on relying on system memory to speed up your computer.
Increasing system memory is the old fashioned way of improving computer performance when dealing with lots of data at once, but, with the advent of SSD’s, the amount of memory needed to see a big improvement has increased somewhat.
SSD’s are the newest storage technology and they’re getting bigger, faster, and more affordable every year. I highly recommend photo editors and video editors buy multiple SSD’s for their computer for the reasons I will share in this post.
If your computer can take a second SSD for your working files, you’re good! Many laptops have a slot in them for an extra SSD which means all you need to do is get that second SSD, install it, and follow the rest of the instructions in this post.
The Problem with 1 SSD or HDD
The basic problem, or so I have been led to believe, is that when all these programs and processes are trying to use the same HDD or SSD, they start to incur penalties due to something called latency. For instance, in a computer with only 1 drive Lightroom is forced to read and write files to the same drive. So, because all of the stuff that Lightroom is trying to do is on the same drive, it causes Lightroom to constantly have to wait for itself to finish doing something on that drive before it can move on to the next thing to do on that drive. The result for you, the end user, is that Lightroom looks like it is running slow.
The reality is, Lightroom isn’t running slow, and it’s not really your computer that is running slow either… the HDD or SSD is bottlenecking your computer.
It’s not just when importing images that this problem can occur. It can also occur when simply browsing your catalog due to something called a pagefile. A pagefile is a type of “memory” which is located on a HDD or SSD. This where a program may store temporary data that is the result of some kind of processing. The pagefile ends up causing similar problems as the Catalog file and it should also be put on a separate drive.
The fact that Lightroom is constantly reading and writing to the pagefile while it is also reading and writing to the Catalog file and reading data from the images saved in your photos directory means that too much is going on with a single drive and your computer will look like it is slowing down.
Sometimes users may see the CPU suddenly spike up when Lightroom starts to get slow and they may think they need a faster CPU. The thing that is happening is somewhat complex and kind of pointless to mention but basically, the CPU is being thrashed by excessive I/O.
The best solution to all this is to get a dedicated SSD to hold Lightroom’s Catalog files. By putting all of the Lightroom Catalogs onto a separate SSD or HDD Lightroom will no longer be bottlnecked with itself when reading and writing to the Catalog, it will now be 100% freed up to read and write to the Catalog as fast as the HDD or SSD will allow.
If your computer doesn’t have 2 drives in it for you to use, then you really should install a second drive into your computer just for your Lightroom Catalogs.
Once you do that it’s as simple as copying all your catalogs to the new dedicated catalog drive and every time you open a catalog it should load and run a lot faster!
Even with larger catalogs you shouldn’t notice the computer slowing down nearly as much as when you only had 1 drive to store everything on your computer.
It’s important to realize that the second drive must contain the Lightroom Catalogs only. It can’t contain the source photos and it can’t contain the OS or pagefile. It must be ONLY the Lightroom Catalogs.
With video editing the logic is similar. First, you’ll want to keep your working source videos and/or proxies on their own SSD. Doing this will give the CPU/GPU a direct line of access to those files and no other program is going to interfere with that direct line of access. That means you can easily play back your video at 4k or even 8k as the case may be.
Going Further
There is a lot more to explain on this subject so if you’re interested in delving into the full details of how to architect your system to get it running how you need it to run, check out our courses page for more details. View our Courses.
