Adobe Lightroom may be the RAW photo editor of choice among many photographers, but working with large quantities of big files means speed is often a chief complaint. Older computers, in particular, can suffer from slower imports and delays while editing. But, tweaking some settings can help Lightroom users eke out more speed, even on an older device.
Try these seven ways to speed up Lightroom Classic, as well as a few that apply to Lightroom CC as well.
Optimize your hardware
A major part of any software’s performance is the hardware that’s running it. While updating to the latest-and-greatest computer, particularly one with four or more processing cores and a lot of RAM, will help Lightroom to run faster, you can likely squeeze a bit more performance out of your current computer by optimizing it or upgrading individual components.
First, make sure your hard drive isn’t full. Lightroom (and pretty much any other program) will run best if at least 20% of the hard drive is empty. If your hard drive is more than 80% full, move files to an external hard drive or delete unnecessary files.
Also check that your operating system is up-to-date. Updating your OS, in most cases, also updates your graphics driver and can often improve the overall performance of your machine.
