[Leica] How to make Lightroom Classic run faster on your Windows PC

[Frank Filippone]

This is a help article....

My Desktop system is running fine but it is 9 Years old..... My laptop 
is 10 years old...

I decided to try out a new Laptop, about 2 model years old....

I wondered if they were getting too long in the tooth.... so I made some 
measurements....

I used a set of 5 images that needed to be stitched.  They were put on a 
thumb drive, a new catalog was created, LR was updated to the most 
recent updates.

The results showed that my 9 year old desktop computer was almost 
exactly TWICE AS SLOW as the new laptop.  I know that my older Laptop is 
even slower....it is an I5 processor.

To be fair, I am retired, an amateur photographer, which all means that 
time is NOT money.....slow and cheap makes more sense.

Then again, how slow is too slow?

So I started to look at new hardware...... and read a lot of 
articles..... and consulted a lot of AI produced evaluations, all of 
which led to these conclusions.....

No matter what your computer's age, do this to make it go faster....

MORE RAM!!! RAM is cheap.   If your computer can upgrade to 32gb or 48 
or 64, do it..... Just fill it up.

Have your LR Catalog on a SSD inside your computer.  This is a major 
speed improvement. The SSD should NOT be a slower SATA version .

It is fastest to keep your images on internal SSD as well, but depending 
on how many images you have, this may be impractical.

NAS  is fast but complex to keep running.  Slower is an external USB SSD 
drive, and slower yet is a moving disk USB HDD.

If you are buying a new computer, get an I7 processor (cores matter with 
some operations in LR).....  More cores = Better....

I9 is more cores and $$$ but reports are that they are not that much 
faster.  Stay away form the I5 or I3 processors.

LR uses more cores when it is making previews or exporting 
images.....For single (common) image edits, not at all.

You should select a graphics card with at least 6GB of video ram.  
NVIDIA is apparently more stable than AMD. The Intel graphics solutions 
are workable but if you want to run faster, get the discrete graphics 
card solution.


If you wish help, ask me.....

-- Frank Filippone BMWRed735i at gmail.com