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Archive 2013 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?

  
 
jzucker
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


Anyone notice the lightroom 5.2 bug where you select a photo and go to edit, print or export it and lightroom uses a different file than the one that you previously had selected? Sometimes, I have to repeat the action up to 5x before it selects the right file. I'm considering switching to photo mechanic.

And regarding performance, i'm running an i7 3820 with 32gb memory , 8tb of free disk space and a 256gb SSD so it ain't the hardware.

Photo mechanic is so much faster. Anyone using it?



Oct 09, 2013 at 10:30 PM
lukeb
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


I'm not having any problems with L/R 5.2 on my system.


Oct 09, 2013 at 10:59 PM
sivrajbm
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


No I haven't noticed that bug either...


Oct 09, 2013 at 11:11 PM
jonjack56
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


As I understand it though there is a relatively easy work around. This bug supposedly happens when you select photos from 'within the grid' to publish, export or edit in. I am told that if you maintain the 'grid view' but select your photos from the 'filmstrip' you shouldnt have a problem. As this is what I tend to do in any case, it may well explain why I havent run into the bug.


Oct 10, 2013 at 12:41 AM
Paul Mo
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


User error - usually. Or a weird conflict with something in your system. I have LR5.2 open and it does not behave like that.


Oct 10, 2013 at 02:09 AM
jzucker
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


jonjack56 wrote:
As I understand it though there is a relatively easy work around. This bug supposedly happens when you select photos from 'within the grid' to publish, export or edit in. I am told that if you maintain the 'grid view' but select your photos from the 'filmstrip' you shouldnt have a problem. As this is what I tend to do in any case, it may well explain why I havent run into the bug.


Thanks. I've read about that solution. Will try it. I rarely have the filmstrip open but may have to do it more.

And no, not user error. I think there are a lot of problems you run into when your database is 1TB as mine is. It used to be 2TB but that was unmanageable. Program is still slow but much faster now that the database is smaller.

Anyone try photo mechanic?



Oct 10, 2013 at 07:35 AM
g-money
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


5.2 running really nice and no issues. As for Photo Mechanic I know lots who use it strictly for culling. Generates previews extremely fast. I personally use faststone image viewer for culling. Less functionality than PM, but does the culling job for free.


Oct 10, 2013 at 08:54 AM
jrash168
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


I use Photo Mechanic along with LR. Photo Mechanic is great for going through your photos and captioning images. You can do crops but that is as far it goes as far as editing.


Oct 10, 2013 at 09:26 AM
jzucker
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


jrash168 wrote:
I use Photo Mechanic along with LR. Photo Mechanic is great for going through your photos and captioning images. You can do crops but that is as far it goes as far as editing.


I'm not using lightroom for much in the way of editing. Most of my editing is done in ACR and then Photoshop. I do utilize lightroom's cropping on virtual copies and the print module. Does Photo Mechanic have a comparable print functionality? I do like the lightroom sharpening for prints. Makes it very convenient not to have to save the sharpening characteristics in the PSD files...



Oct 10, 2013 at 09:50 AM
jrash168
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


Any processing besides cropping has to be done with a different program. PM basically allows you to view your photos very quickly, add captions, metadata, etc. You can export to PS or LR and do your edits and printing from there. What I usually do is go through the images and tag them through PM then export the tagged items to LR for edits.


Oct 10, 2013 at 01:29 PM
jzucker
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


jrash168 wrote:
Any processing besides cropping has to be done with a different program. PM basically allows you to view your photos very quickly, add captions, metadata, etc. You can export to PS or LR and do your edits and printing from there. What I usually do is go through the images and tag them through PM then export the tagged items to LR for edits.


How is the database for large file counts in photo mechanic? When I first started using lightroom, I had a 2TB database of pictures. I spent weeks adding keywords and metadata and then found out that lightroom basically sucks for a database of that size so now I try to keep the active database smaller than 750GB worth of images. It's manageable but I'd love to be able to either have keywords active for terabytes worth of data or to be able to just name my folders in a way that the metadata is contained in the folder / file names

i.e.

backgrounds\walls\brick
backgrounds\clouds\dark
seniors\shellyJones

etc.

Unfortunately, lightroom cannot do that without importing thumbnails and metadata into the database for all your images and as mentioned before, large image counts/size seems to cripple its performance.



Oct 10, 2013 at 02:06 PM
jrash168
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


I really can't answer that question since I haven't really done much with that. PM has a 20 day free trial, you can download it and try it. You can also talk to the guys at Camera Bits who developed PM, they are more than willing to help you out.


Oct 11, 2013 at 03:26 PM
nolaguy
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


jzucker wrote:
When I first started using lightroom, I had a 2TB database of pictures. I spent weeks adding keywords and metadata and then found out that lightroom basically sucks for a database of that size so now I try to keep the active database smaller than 750GB worth of images. It's manageable but I'd love to be able to either have keywords active for terabytes worth of data or to be able to just name my folders in a way that the metadata is contained in the folder / file names


Jack, perhaps someone else can confirm but I seem to recall hearing in a lynda.com tutorial that the earlier versions of Lightroom had a severe limitation regarding catalog size but that as of 4.0 (I think) there was essentially no limit and the tutorial author preferred to keep all his work in one catalog.

If you were initially using 3.0, you might want to look into it and see if I'm remembering correctly.

hth

Chuck



Oct 13, 2013 at 10:46 AM
hondageek
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


5.2 is pretty solid. I have a similar W7X64 machine that runs Lr with no issues.

The size of your database of photos doesn't really matter to Lr. Mine has about 5tb of images that Lr is working with. It's the size of your .lrcat file that matters more, but even that hasn't slowed down my machine too much.



Oct 14, 2013 at 08:52 AM
jzucker
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


hondageek wrote:
5.2 is pretty solid. I have a similar W7X64 machine that runs Lr with no issues.

The size of your database of photos doesn't really matter to Lr. Mine has about 5tb of images that Lr is working with. It's the size of your .lrcat file that matters more, but even that hasn't slowed down my machine too much.


I agree with your first premise but not the 2nd. With a 2TB set of images (not sure the size of the .lrcat file) lightroom was almost unusable with my i7-3820, 32GB memory, 256GB SSD, 8TB free diskspace.

When I pared my image size down to 750GB, the application is usable though it's still not what I'd call snappy. Whereas photomechanic is definitely snappy. However, I'd have a hard time giving up the print module in lightroom. I really like what it does. And I also use it for presenting to clients, cropping, etc.



Oct 14, 2013 at 09:45 AM
Alan321
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


jzucker, it might be that you have to expand the size of your ACR cache and put it as well as the Lr preview cache and Lr catalog file onto the SSD. The Lr preview cache grows as needed but the ACR cache will not, and if parts of it are being overwritten and subsequently needed again then Lr is forced to drag the raw data off the HDD, which might be pretty slow. In that case using a striped RAID or confining your images to a partition occupying the first 30-50% of a speedy HDD will increase both access speed and transfer speed. So might defragging the HDD.

Within Lr you might try deferring sharpening and noise reduction as long as possible as these are real slow-it-down features.

I've also wondered whether or not Lr consolidates individual changes to edit controls or applies each one individually. e.g. if you make 5 changes to exposure before settling on one that you like then you might be incurring those 5 edit commands every time you work on the file in the Develop module rather than just a single command with the required final exposure value.

It also pays to not use .xmp files if you don't absolutely need them. That will prevent a lot drive access - probably to the slow HDD if your images are stored there. Instead, I keep that data in the catalog and just make sure that the catalog is well backed up - meaning often and in multiple places.

You cannot avoid writing the .xmp data to the drive if you are using dng files because Lr always puts that data directly into the dng files. That involves reading and writing the entire dng file as a new version of it is created each time you edit it - perhaps several times in one edit session. It means transferring tens of MB instead of a few bytes. Using raw files avoids this hassle.

Funny thing, I cannot recall seeing mention of raw vs dng in any Lr performance discussions. I think most people don't even think about mentioning which file type they are using because for them it's always there.


Photomechanic would be snappier partly because it shows you the built-in preview thumbnail images whereas Lr is always showing you the result of all of your edit commands (or at least it is trying to do so asap).

- Alan



Oct 22, 2013 at 10:35 AM
jzucker
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


i never sharpen or do NR within lightroom. I rarely do editing in lightroom except color temp. I have solved the problem for the time being by only keeping the last year's worth of work in the active catalog. The program is so !@#$ snappy now !

I tried photo mechanic and really liked it but i would miss lightroom's cropping and the print module.

One thing that I liked about photomechanic is that it would show me other file types in the grid (i.e. RIF files). Unfortunately, it can't render them but that's probably solvable with a plug-in.

However, for now i'm sticking with lightroom



Oct 22, 2013 at 11:40 AM
Alan321
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


Are you mostly using raw files, or dng ?




Oct 23, 2013 at 10:01 AM
jzucker
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p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


Alan321 wrote:
Are you mostly using raw files, or dng ?



Canon Raw files CR2 only. No DNG



Oct 23, 2013 at 12:20 PM
Alan321
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p.1 #20 · p.1 #20 · Lightroom bugs and slowness/switching to photo mechanic?


What sort of storage device(s) are you using for your images ? And what sort of performance does it have ?

e.g. a RAID HDD array ? A usb 2 drobo ? individual HDDs ?

What interface to the storage ? e.g. thunderbolt, eSATA, SATA, USB 3 or 2, FW 800 or 400 ?

Did you check the size and location (SSD) of your ACR cache ?




Oct 23, 2013 at 03:39 PM
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