I bought a new Mac just for photo editing, but Lightroom still feels unreasonably slow on it. I have tried both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, but both are not nearly as responsive as I would expect. Especially when doing things like using the Heal tools. Are there any settings I can adjust to make it operate faster?
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I have the same computer - Absolutely terrible performance in lightroom.
I even went back to apple - their only suggestion was to upgrade to the Macbook M3 with 16gb RAM
8GB ram … 🥴
You definitely don’t have enough RAM, I recommend closing everything you can that would be running in the background, and then also try building a new Lightroom catalogue with only a few photos in it, see if that works better
Store photos and edit them on an external SSD. Look at setting and setup videos
As others have said, Lightroom is a pig,and 8 gigs is way too low. 16 is better, 32 better still cause then you can have other stuff going on as well.
All macbooks should be strong enough to run photo apps. Adobe apps are just poorly optimized, I also use capture one and affinity photo and both are significantly faster on my m1 mac than the Adobe apps.
Oh my. I feel you. I feel scammed. I got a new MacBook Pro in 2018 and I’ve never regretted to buy something as much as this computer. Never again. I remember I bought it cuz I was relocating to Japan for taking pictures. I’ve only installed photoshop and it already said: you ram is running low (???)
First off, Lightroom on the Mac is a big resource hog. 8GB is the minimum requirement and Adobe recommends 16GB. That’s just the basic recommendation, regardless of what files you are editing. And then you are editing A7Riv raw files, so you are really going to be taxing things.
8GB RAM is the culprit. 16GB should be the bare minimum these days.
capture one works perfectly on a macbook and in my opinion it’s way better
Lightroom sucks and also why would Apple sell a computer with 8GB RAM in the year of our lord 2023
Right? That’s how much RAM my 3+ year old phone has. 8gb hasn’t been enough for a computer for like 10 years.
8 GB is the reason, especially if you’re using Raw files. Adobe will rip through RAM on my Windows machine with a dedicated GPU memory. I’ve seen it eclipse 20 GB of RAM from time to time (mostly because it’s available it will cache images).
Apples M series chipsets are very efficient with everything being contained on a single die. With that, RAM is a shared resource for the CPU and GPU. Since Lightroom accelerated certain tasking via GPU (like heal or masking) it might run slow if the CPU is also running a lot of data through RAM. I’d open system monitor while you’re running Lightroom and see if you’re hitting a bottleneck.
I watched this video the other day and as everyone says, it’s probably the memory or lack of it. In the video the guy also tests Lightroom editing with 8Gb and 16Gb models. I have a Macbook Pro M1 Max with 32Gb memory and everything works very well.
“8GB Apple Silicon RAM is the same as 16GB PC RAM” /s
The biggest choke point for any sort of media editing is the hard drive. What’s your drive setup for your catalog and photos?