Lightroom Classic Running Slow on M1 Macbook Pro

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Level 1

13 points

Lightroom Classic Running Slow on M1 Macbook Pro

Last month I finally got my new 16" M1 MacBook Pro (exact specs below) and Lightroom Classic is running very slow on it. The main reason I upgraded from my 2012 MacBook Pro to this one was because Lightroom was running slow on the outdated machine. All of my photos that I work on are stored on a 4TB Synology DiskStation. Importing and exporting photos, editing and generally moving around within the program takes forever. I'm so disappointed that after spending a small fortune I'm having the same issue I had on a 10 year old MacBook! I've used Lightroom for many years and don't want to switch to another editing program. Is there anything that can help it run faster?

Hardware:

16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display
1TB SSD storage (currently 710 GB available)
Three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI port, SDXC card slot, MagSafe 3 port
32GB unified memory
Apple M1 Pro with 10-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine

Posted on Jul 19, 2022 6:57 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

lobsterghost1

Level 10

149,058 points

Jul 19, 2022 7:12 PM in response to jojocino

I just opened and used LR Classic on my 16" MacBook Pro M1 Pro 16GB Memory and it runs as I would expect it to. Are you sure you're running the Adobe Cloud software which is optimized to M1 Silicone?

Any chance you've downloaded any Antivirus/Cleanup tools on your your Mac? If you have, REMOVE them. A Mac doesn't need them and they often cause all sorts of issues with software and system performance.

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Answer 2

Jul 31, 2022 9:54 AM in response to jojocino

I am having the same issue, but my Macbook M1 Max has even slightly better specs than yours. Exporting is quick but it is really struggling to import from this SD card which I have imported from quickly many times on two different machines. It is a bit frustrating to spend so much money on what is an otherwise very fast machine and have issues like this in Lightroom.

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Answer 3

jojocino Author

Level 1

13 points

Jul 31, 2022 10:46 AM in response to dawnfirephotography

I agree, so frustrating! Let me know if you end up finding anything that helps. I know you can tweak the Lightroom settings in various ways to try to improve performance but I am not a Lightroom pro so I haven't messed with the settings much.

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Answer 4

jojocino Author

Level 1

13 points

Aug 21, 2022 7:45 PM in response to dawnfirephotography

I just got back from vacation and imported 450 photos, but instead of putting them on my 4TB Synology DiskStation (where all my other photos are) I imported them directly to the MacBook hard drive to see if it would work faster. Lightroom seems to be working fine if the photos are on the hard drive...the problem is I typically work from my server where all my photos are stored.

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