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

[Don Dory]

Any thoughts about dedicated gaming computers?  With the increased AI in
Adobe products a fast internet helps.

Don
don.dory at gmail.com

On Wed, Jul 9, 2025, 12:10 PM Frank Filippone via LUG <lug at leica-users.org>
wrote:

> 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
>
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