So, you’re having computer problems when running Photoshop, Lightroom, or any other Photo or Video editing program?
That is very sad to hear. The good news is that I have a cure for you. And that cure is also pretty simple but may require a little technical knowhow on your part.
First and foremost, the reason computers tend to slow down when running Adobe applications or other applications that deal with large amounts of data such as images and video is because of something calling a page file.
Page files are basically a form of memory that is kept on the computer’s hard drive, commonly referred to as an HDD or SSD depending on the technology in your computer.
Because the HDD or SSD are a lot slower than main system memory, accessing the page file slows down Lightroom or any other program that has to put working data into the page file.
The problem with Lightroom specifically goes beyond the page file and really revolves around the catalog itself.
Far be it from me to speculate how it works, but here is what I think the computer is doing. Imagine that your page file and your catalog file are on the same slow HDD. You start up Lightroom and it needs to load data into main memory, but, main memory is full, so, it is writing catalog data to the page file. However, the page file is on the same HDD as the catalog data. This means that the HDD is bottlenecked with itself. It is literally reading and writing the same data to itself into another location. Duplicating data like this onto the same HDD is one of the slowest operations a computer can perform.
So, the solution is to make sure that your page file and your catalog file are on SEPARATE HDDs or SSDs.
Once you are able to separate out the page file and the catalog files you should see a huge performance increase in loading and working with large Lightroom Catalogs.
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.
Now, 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!
The really great thing is that now you shouldn’t notice too much of a performance difference even with larger catalogs. Eventually the catalog will get so big that it will slow down again but that limit will be substantially higher because of this system architecture. (Specific numbers will be determined by your system specifications).
If you are doing video editing, 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. The keyword here is WORKING videos, that is, only the videos you’re using for a current project. You’re not going to store video on this drive, it is only for WORKING copies/proxies.
Good luck and thanks for reading!