Can anyone make sense of this?

I’ve been clicking around all over and there’s so much contradiction – SSD/physical/size/partitioning…

Do I even need one? My PC is 3.4Ghz with 8Gb of RAM

Had a few LR crashes and stalls, mainly when trying to go too fast

Not quite sure what your question is, but I happily run lightroom on a computer less powerful than yours dealing with 25mb raw files.

Hope that helps!

Personally I don’t feel I need to set too much thought to it. As I understand it it gets used for the previews of images as you scan through them…. but it doesn’t create full size previews unless you set it to do so ….

So when you land on an image it’ll read the smaller preview and display it whilst reading and decoding the full size image and displaying it a second or so later…. rendering the preview pointless imho.

Unless you really can’t stand that fraction pause of waiting for the full image to render … Just leave it be.

Lightroom can crash occassionaly … it always has done. When it asks to back up the catalogue I let it do so just for the reason it can crash.

I thought I was mistaken, I thought I heard your words
Tell me how do I feel? Tell me now, how do I feel?

Those who came before me lived through their vocations
From the past until completion, they’ll turn away no more
And still I find it so hard to say what I need to say
But I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me just how I should feel today

I see a ship in the harbour. I can and shall obey
But if it wasn’t for your misfortune, I’d be a heavenly person today
And I thought I was mistaken, and I thought I heard you speak
Tell me, how do I feel? Tell me now, how should I feel?

Now I stand here waiting…

3.4Ghz with 8Gb of RAM

shouldn’t really.

Unless you’re a *serious* power user with full-frame RAWs etc I don’t think there’s a point. To be honest my Lightroom disk is an external USB 3 HDD and that’s fine with the RAWs from my EOS 40D and GF8.

Lightroom doesn’t use a scratch disk, does it? Try building 1:1 previews of all your images and see if that stops the slow down.

OK, I’ll stick with what I’ve got then and try the suggestions

It’s recommended 2 gig RAM min and 8 best

Also the 1:1 preview and looking through stuff in the library module, rather than the develop

Some good general info here:

10 Tips to Improve Lightroom’s Speed and Performance Without Additional Hardware

Biggest improvement I made to my workflow was to use the Import function in LR to copy direct from my SD cards to the HDD. You can set LR to build the 1:1 previews after it’s imported the photos, so once you set the import running you go off and do something else/surf the web/whatever. With the 1:1’s built, browsing through in the Library module is pretty quick. Shortcut keys G, E and D are my most used ones to switch back and forth between the two library views and the Develop module.

(8GB RAM with LR on a 128GB SSD, photos and library on a USB3 HDD)

Good tips there Kit, thanks

How are your drives arranged then? I’m presuming you have another drive with your OS etc on, and your 128 SSD is a dedicated drive for LR? And the USB is a dedicated drive for pics/library? And does this arrangement simplify things and make everything run smoother/faster?

Am I near or completely off? (My IT skills are about the same as my biking ones 😉 )

Cheers