andywilk38 Loc: Cambridge UK

Thanks for your input....a few things to check.

andywilk38 Loc: Cambridge UK

Thanks for your input...a few things I can check up on.

SonyBug

It happens to me all the time. For me it is my computer automatically downloading program updates. Grrrr, wish I could find all of them and turn them off. Some days the internet is slower and it slows down the downloads....

GENorkus Loc: Washington Twp, Michigan

I don't own those cameras but could one camera be set to a compressed RAW file and the other not?

To me uncompressing would be an additional step which would take longer.

*(Sounds like your d4 is about to explode. You have to give it to me for proper disposal before you get hurt. LoL)

andywilk38 Loc: Cambridge UK

Thanks for your suggestions.

Just checked - both cameras were set to lossless compressed RAW.

BatManPete Loc: Way Up North!

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fotoless

Not wishing to show my ignorance of all of this but...I'm assuming you're running off-line?

Linda Ewing Loc: Lincolnshire,UK

I have just purchased the 27" Mac retina screen, exactly the same thing happened, really slow on a brand new Mac!! I had to empty the trash and all sorts, in fact it still is a bit slow

andywilk38 Loc: Cambridge UK

Yes....everything is sourced from local HDD

Linda Ewing Loc: Lincolnshire,UK

sorry didn't finish my reply, what made a difference though was going through my LR backup procedure, I had so many back ups it was unbelievable, I now go through the back up regularly and just keep the last three. This DID make a huge difference. Hope this helps.

What part of Cambridge are you from if you don't mind me asking. I know it well, my daughter lives in Caldecote.

andywilk38 Loc: Cambridge UK

Oh dear!

Linda, my brief to Apple Business team was "I want to be able to work with these image files at 'click speed' ". In other words, when I clicked the mouse I expected near-instantaneous processing results. For various reasons I didn't understand technically, but which made logical sense, they convinced me that the highest spec Mac Pro was not the answer, even though I was prepared to buy one. What I needed, they said, is what I have - the highest spec Retina 5K.

I went back to them simply because my expectations were not met. However, I've stuck with this configuration a) because I like Macs, and b) because it is an improvement on my then ageing previous iMac. They said, "It is to do with running third party (Adobe) software on my machine". My view was that they need to build machines with that in mind, and work with the fact that nothing at present will beat LR and PS (yeah, OK, maybe Aperture) but not PS.

It is that just sometimes I am utterly astounded at how this Mac can seemingly struggle....it's a bit like having a top of the range, excellent road-holding luxury car which, for some unknown reason, occasionally slips out of gear when you're going up hill !! I even made enquiries about PC based rigs, but most people said 'what are you worried about, you're getting the best'.

I have to say, that a large photo studio using 60-100MP sensor cameras would be dead in the water using this!

That said, I live with the occasional frustrations as well as in hope that one day.....

:)

CaptainBobBrown

One other thought on intermittent slowness in LR ... well actually 2 thoughts. I suspect that after processing a number of images LR pauses to reload buffers. This will produce noticeable pauses in image processing. In fact any image processing software working on a batch of images 1 photo at a time is going to do this. There will be some variability in this depending on disk or SSD storage geometery even for files coming from the same directory for a variety of technical reasons. For example, larger image files may have their XMP sidecar files located in the same area on disk due to initial space configurations you have no control over whereas smaller ones may have more fragmented storage locations causing longer or shorter pauses for buffer reloads.

It's probably not worth doing but you can effect pause times by loading your images onto a clean disk so that the operating system stores all your images sequentially. You can later move them to your primary storage areas using LR of course so that it's catalogue (really a database file) is kept current. One other thing to try is to reboot your machine so that its memory is cleared before starting LR. This will enable the OS to create buffers from minimally fragmented areas of RAM. Any modern OS whether MAC, Windows, or Linux will give a program logically contiguous buffers but underneath the logical structures are potentially fragmented tables of smaller chunks of memory.

The thing about image processing software is that it is usually designed with conflicting performance requirements in mind but requires large areas of memory because of the large and growing sizes of modern digital image files. It is the rare company that tells end users how to maximize specific performance so it takes a fairly deep understanding of how both the OS and the product software have to work together to figure out in specific instances how to optimize speed.

One product I recently learned about which optimizes for speed at the cost of minimized functionality is Photo Mechanic. It takes a reasonable time to load images onto your hard drive (or SDD) but then works quickly and consistently. I got it to use on my 5 year old MacBook Pro on which Lightroom had gotten too slow. I only expect to use it for initial screening and culling while on the road but in my first tests with several gigs worth of imagery it did very well. For subsequent post processing in Piccure and Light Room on my primary iMac at home I'll move the image files surviving the initial screening from my MacBook to my iMac.

Good luck with all this. In summary, to get best speed you need to minimize disk and RAM IO (input-output) times by starting with least fragmented storage. Reboot before a post-processing session and use a clean drive for initial storage. If necessary, reformat the intermediate storage drive before loading images from your camera or card.

RaydancePhoto

It sounds like your processor is busy doing something, may not even be LR might be some other processor intensive software.

When it happens, you can go to your Task Manager and look at the processes. Sort the processes by CPU to see what is using the most resources. If it something you are not using or need running, you can kill the process, freeing up the processor.

scsdesphotography Loc: Southeastern Michigan

Andywilk38, It is frustrating when you spend the big money and don't get the performance you expect. I suspect the intermittent issues you are experiencing has to do with background processes taking place while you are processing in LR. LR saves everything as you make changes, if your drive is busy doing something else, everything slows down for a moment. Also LR now makes use of your graphics card for processing and some bottlenecks may be taking place there. The RAW files produced by different model camera's are slightly different and that may explain why the images from one camera are more affected than the other.

andywilk38 Loc: Cambridge UK

Thank you for your comprehensive suggestions...