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Archive 2014 · Help - Lightroom not responding

  
 
Greg Schneider
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Help - Lightroom not responding


I'm running LR 5.3 (x64) on Windows 7, and have been for over a year with no significant issues. I have about 190k files in the catalog.

As of the other day, I find that I have about 10-20 seconds after opening LR before it goes into a not responding state which it doesn't seem to come out of. I've tried renaming the preferences file (which helped temporarily), optimizing and scanning my catalogue, but the problem seems to keep coming back.

I certainly hope this is not a corrupt catalog as I have most things saved there vs xmp. However, I do have fairly recent backups.

Any tips/ideas are greatly appreciated.



Jan 07, 2014 at 03:10 PM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Help - Lightroom not responding


Just thinking aloud but

Could you have a bad drive or something ? Copy the lrcat file to another drive and run it from there (just double click the lrcat file) . Running it in a different location would also start to build new preview file as well (I've had a bad preview file before and LR was going funny . Deleted the previews and let it build them again and it seemed to be ok. This was quite some time ago so I can't remember much )



Jan 07, 2014 at 06:26 PM
Greg Schneider
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Help - Lightroom not responding


I've considered that...it runs off my SSD and the photos are on my mechanical drive. Neither of which has shown any issues, but certainly something to try, and also to backup again!


Jan 07, 2014 at 10:43 PM
Greg Schneider
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Help - Lightroom not responding


Might be the previews actually. I removed them from that folder and things seem fine.

I could see that being the issue as it seemed to hang as soon as I began using the interface, when it was likely trying to access previews.



Jan 07, 2014 at 11:41 PM
docsmiles17
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Help - Lightroom not responding


Greg Schneider wrote:
Might be the previews actually. I removed them from that folder and things seem fine.

I could see that being the issue as it seemed to hang as soon as I began using the interface, when it was likely trying to access previews.


Yes pay close attention to what the preview setting is when importing photos. If its 1:1, it will load very sloooooow.
Default is to delete them after 30 days but you can over ride that setting.



Jan 08, 2014 at 03:17 AM
Greg Schneider
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Help - Lightroom not responding


docsmiles17 wrote:
Yes pay close attention to what the preview setting is when importing photos. If its 1:1, it will load very sloooooow.
Default is to delete them after 30 days but you can over ride that setting.


I only generate minimal previews on import, and 1:1 were set to be deleted after 30 days, but I'm thinking they became corrupted somehow.



Jan 08, 2014 at 09:00 AM
arbitrage
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Help - Lightroom not responding


Yes, you most likely had some corruption in one or many previews. Glad that you found the solution as I imagine that would have been a stressful situation.


Jan 08, 2014 at 10:14 AM
Alan321
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Help - Lightroom not responding


You could back up your previews occasionally if space is not an issue, but since they take only time to be rebuilt from scratch whenever needed it is not an essential thing to back up. In fact, as part of a routine backup process they just get in the way.

I suppose we can only wonder what went wrong. Perhaps the computer was shut down or powered down before changes to the previews had finished being written to the drive. Windows lets you enable or disable write caching for each drive to prevent such glitches. Unless you have an uninterruptable power supply or use a laptop with a healthy battery, any mains-powered drives are at risk in the even of a power failure.

Or maybe it was just a random glitch that would happen regardless of power supply - such things really do happen.


I like to keep 1:1 previews because they speed things up in the Lr Library module. However, I either discard all of the obvious crap before importing the rest into Lr, or else I import everything into Lr with minimal previews, discard the crap and then build 1:1 previews. Either way prevents wasting too much time on 1:1 previews of rubbish. Of course whether you have 1:1 previews or not, opening an image in the Develop module re-converts raw files and largely bypasses the preview system.

- Alan



Jan 12, 2014 at 12:38 PM
Greg Schneider
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Help - Lightroom not responding


I'm starting to run into this again. It's hard to say if it's due to the smart previews themselves (or even disk) or the way I have used a junction to place them on another drive. If I view LR with procmon, I see it begins to access the smart previews after startup, and that's when it gets into a not responding state.

If I remove that link so LR thinks there are no smart previews, I have no issues at all.



Feb 11, 2014 at 09:00 PM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Help - Lightroom not responding


Greg Schneider wrote:
I'm starting to run into this again. It's hard to say if it's due to the smart previews themselves (or even disk) or the way I have used a junction to place them on another drive. If I view LR with procmon, I see it begins to access the smart previews after startup, and that's when it gets into a not responding state.

If I remove that link so LR thinks there are no smart previews, I have no issues at all.



what do you mean by "used a junction" ? are the Smarts not in the same location as the LRcat?

i dont know about windows as I use a mac now but as far as I can see the smarts (and normal previews) need to be in the same location as the LRcat .

But also if your smarts are causing the issue I would ask do you actually need the smart previews ?
do you use your Lightroom Cat away from the PC with the images on ?
do you export small Cat files that have Smarts with them ? ie for use on a laptop while your away from ypur PC.

if you dont do any work without you main image files present then you dont need smart previews as they do nothing when the main image is present on the system .



Feb 12, 2014 at 02:27 AM
Greg Schneider
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Help - Lightroom not responding


A junction is essentially the same as a link within the file structure. I don't have nearly enough room to store both catalog and Smart Previews on my SSD, so the previews go on a larger disk.


Feb 12, 2014 at 09:11 AM
schlotz
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Help - Lightroom not responding


Greg Schneider wrote:
A junction is essentially the same as a link within the file structure. I don't have nearly enough room to store both catalog and Smart Previews on my SSD, so the previews go on a larger disk.


My first reaction is that this ^^^ might be at the heart of the issue you are experiencing.



Feb 12, 2014 at 11:07 AM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Help - Lightroom not responding


schlotz wrote:
My first reaction is that this ^^^ might be at the heart of the issue you are experiencing.



Yep , it would be the first place id start looking .

Greg . when you say you dont have nearly enough room on your SSD can you expand on that?(I do understand how the LR cat and the preview files can get quite big )

How big is your SSD drive? is it your primary drive (C ? how much room would the LRcat plus both sets of preview files take up?

also would there be anyway you can reduce the size of the files ?

I run my LRcat and both preview files on my imac's internal drive but I also sync those to an external SSD (128gb) drive to use on a laptop at work . now while im not so critical for space I do have to make sure I can keep the size down to a reasonable size .
Now I only have my LR build small previews on import and discard 1:1 previews after a week or so . I figure I dont need LR to keep quite large 1:1 previews for stuff that i may not view for a while . and anyway if I do go into that image in the library module its not a big deal if LR needs to build a new 1:1 preview . heck if im really short of space on the drive then the previews are the first thing tossed out of the basket as LR can always build new ones

now as for Smart previews (something I really like) . Like I said these are only relevant if you want to work on your files when you dont have your actual image files present (ie you dont have the drive containing your RAW files with you) . so typicaly if your on a desktop type machine with your image drive attatched then you can toss the Smart previews as your not using them .
but as I say I do use 'Smarts' and while they are much smaller than RAW files they can still build up quite a bit of space . So I use mine in a couple of ways (well ive experimented with a couple of different ways )
At the moment I take my complete Catalogue with me on that external SSD drive and as I dont always know what images i want to play with I try to keep as many image files as possible 'Smarted' . but I do try to limit things . So anything thats not Flagged as a pick in my LR cat will have the Smart Preview Discarded . if im tight on space i will also dump anything very old .
Running like this in general is fine for me . and in fact running LR from an LRcat thats on an external SSD (usb3) drive doesnt seem to have a noticeable hit as far as speed goes ,so maybe running your LRcat and preview files from a large enough external SSD is an option for you ? (heck i doubt you would see a huge speed hit if you used a USB3 external portable platter drive)

but Ive also experimented with creating and saving sections of 'Smarts' . usually year segments . I moved the smart file to a separate location after each preview creation . now as long as I didnt change anything about the file I could drop a smart preview file into the folder that contained my LRcat and LR would see the 'smarts' (well sort of see the smarts)
by sort of I mean lr would not indicate a file had a smart preview associated with it and would not let me export that file , but when I go into the develop mode I can PP that file .
Its not an ideal way to work with smart files but its a possible way .

Now Ive also tried the way that Adobe recommend you use smart previews . ie export a Cat file with Smart previews attatched . but I find this to be an issue if I export anything more than a few files . exporting and working the Cats is fine (allows me to work from a memory stick ) but when I try to import from that catalogue its takes ages to combine the 2 cats if i have more than a couple of hundred image files (fine for a single shoot but not much good for sections of my main catalouge ) .

sorry I didnt mean to type so much



Feb 12, 2014 at 02:22 PM





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