karno Loc: Chico ,California

I bought an top of the line iMac about a your ago and ordered it with 2 tb solid state.
I wanted something fast for my photo processing in Lightroom cc and photoshop.
I do a lot of night images and stacking images and basic focus stacking with 46 mp camera.
And tiffs.
I am not sure how fast these computers are supposed to be but after doing some editing on a single file I would get the wheel, and if I try to go full screen it takes about 10-30 seconds?
So I downsampled the 5k monitor in settings and upped the ram to 128 gigs now I have this monster machine but still partial way through editing a file it slows to a crawl, my 2011 MacBook Pro never had this problem, I called Mac they did performance test said all is good,
Had adobe take over computer and do diagnostic they said it looked fine??
So I have a expensive computer that will hardly develop a 100 mb file? Is it that adobe is not compatible?
Do anyone here have this setup and what are your experiences?
Should I do system restore and start again?
Super frustrated.
Thank you for help

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

How full is that 2 Tb drive? Have you allocated Lightroom as much RAM as it can eat?

karno Loc: Chico ,California

Hey thank you for response!
The hard drive is vertically empty and not sure about the allocated ram I thought I set it up for as much ram as I could give it

rjaywallace Loc: Wisconsin

You might want to buy a large external drive and (within Lightroom!!) move your files to that drive. You may be surprised to learn how many files you have and their aggregate size. If that doesn’t help, take/send the computer to Apple for assistance. This is typically a ‘running out of storage space’ or ‘running out of ram’ problem, tho there could be other much less common factors involved.

karno Loc: Chico ,California

Yes thank you my files are on a large external drive.
I have a bit on my desktop right now with experiments but no more then I would have on my laptop

karno Loc: Chico ,California

Where might I find where to allocate ram to Lightroom?

a6k Loc: Detroit & Sanibel

I'm a bit confused about the exact configuration, but if you are using a USB 3.0 or 3.1 external drive then it can become a choke point during reads or writes. Your computer is capable of much, much higher input/output than can be done by a USB 3.0 or 3.1 external drive (they are the same thing but 3.2 is a lot faster). Your computer should have USB-C and/or Thunderbolt connectors for external drives. Those will not slow you down much if at all. Best practice when in doubt would be to make sure the file that you are working on is stored on the internal SSD. Perhaps you are already doing that.

Your statement about allocated RAM is confusing. Unless you do something exotic, your Mac will use all the RAM and all the CPU that it has (assuming the application supports that). How are you "allocating" RAM? And if you are, then why? Your initial speed observations suggest something is quite wrong. Your RAM at 128 is likely a lot more than you need but more than you need will neither slow you down nor make it any faster. It's a rather low-tech suggestion, but be sure that nothing else is running just to make sure you are seeing what the application is doing.

I don't want to start a religious war, but perhaps you should see if the problem exists with some other application. Some that would be OK for the test can be tried at no charge.

And if all else fails, consult the "experts" at the Apple Store. In my experience, which is very limited, the Adobe folks can sometimes be useless. I'm sure that others will strongly disagree with me but give Apple a chance before going batty. Good luck.

karno Loc: Chico ,California

I really don’t know anything about allocating ram😊 it was something another UHH er suggested and I asked him how that was done.

I had apple do a diagnostic they said all was fine.

I am not using my external HD but have about 100 images saved directly in Lightroom.

Anyway I really appreciate you taking the time
Sincerely
Batty

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

In Preferences (Mac OS) Click the File Handling tab.
In the Camera Raw Cache Settings area, experiment with a Maximum Size of 10.0 GB or more.

Try this.

Also, can you defragment a disk in iOS?

a6k Loc: Detroit & Sanibel

Not a good idea to pursue IMHO.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

An iMac pro should do better. You should be able to get some help from a consultant who deals with Macs and Adobe software.

PCB_smv

My IMac isn’t that powerful but I have the same problem with Photoshop. If you find the answer, would you mind posting it.

martinfisherphoto Loc: Lake Placid Florida

My machine is a 2011 mac and runs fine working on my D850 files. My thoughts if your Stacking with Zerene or another stacking software, maybe that's the problem, not able to handle the big files. Or if your stacking through the cloud using Photoshop, maybe your connection speed is killing you. P.S. I'm running on 16GB ram with 2 TB storage. I haven't tried stacking these files yet, only my 24MP files from other camera.

johnst1001a Loc: West Chester, Ohio

Here is a thought. One the bottom left of photoshop there is a pull down menu that gives you the ability to see the image dimensions, size etc. Select size. It will show something like 50m/50M to start. Then asy you do things, like focus stacking, each time you do, you will see your size increase dramatically. I us Nik plugins, and if I use a few, the size of the picture grows dramatically, up to 700mb, to ove 3 gb's in one instance. So now you are working with multiple layer. We he D850 image size, or worse yet a tiff file, your image size can get huge. Now save the file. It could be way bigger than the original file.
What you can do is flatten the image after you are done, and the file size will drop drastically. What I do is denoise first, flatten the image, then do something else which might create a new layer, then flatten. Eache time you flatten, you will keep the changes you made with a much smaller file.

I do panoramas. If you use say 5 picture, blend them, you will have layers, one for each picture, plus the final blended picture. Now you have many gb's in RAM. Since you have finished with the picture layer, dlete their layers and close the individual pictures.

I blended 13 pictures, in a pano the other day, it took 3 hours for the final product. It was 6 gb in size

If you focus stack, the same thing will happen, you ile size will grow dramatically as you have more and more layers. Try flattening the image while and after completing the process. you my help youe slowness issues.
Of course oncw you flatten, you cannot go back and modify the layers.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

We use SSDs at work and were told never to defrag an SSD. Additionally, iMacs run Unix. That system takes care of itself. Unix usually likes to be rebooted about once a month, though. That removes a lot of "junk" that collects over time, inodes.
--Bob