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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I wish Lightroom was good. I stopped using it because it's incredibly slow. Even on a 32 core Threadripper, things like "list the files in this directory" take seconds. I can't deal with it. Honestly, I would have dealt with it, if Adobe's mandatory extra software weren't so annoying. The installer auto-installs a "cloud drive", and then it's in every Explorer window, slowing down every file operation in the OS... that was the last straw for me. (They promised to remove it, but never did, so I stopped paying for their software.)

Honestly, Lightroom never really worked for me. It made easy things hard and hard things impossible. I take a lot of film photographs, and it just didn't integrate with any of the tools I use to capture the images. I do everything manually in several separate pieces of software, and adding one more didn't help much.

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I switched from LR6 to Capture One.

I have C1 and Lightroom 5 kicking around, and I’m currently writing an open-source app to replace LR5’s image organization features.

Just curious, why not use DarkTable or DigiKam?

They're buggy and unreliable, and often slow. I'm on a Mac. They're good when they work but they just aren't ready for primetime. Ok, I might be picky, but I have been a photographer for almost 30 years and I invest in tools for long periods, like I'll want ten years of use from a camera, and I'll want an investment in learning software to pay off. I wish that a lot of the FOSS tools actually focused on UX and what users really need.

Same, and you can still own an actual copy of the software.

Throw cores at that particular problem all you want. Throw 64GB RAM at it, and GPU acceleration. Won't help, since that issue is very likely I/O bottlenecked. So it's unfair to blame Lightroom here.

My photos sit on a 5400 RPM, no SSD cache NAS behind 1G LAN. That is incredibly slow compared to local HDD or even SSD. I don't blame Lightroom here. In fact, the software only takes its time when operating on large volumes on that slow connection. CPU-bound tasks have been just fine for me (16k photos catalogue, i7 mobile CPU, 16GB RAM).

I have the same issues as the parent comment (maybe not quite as bad) despite also having a threadripper, 2080ti, 64GB of ram, and my photos living on a 10GbE connected NAS that's gets 1000+ MB/s. Similar issues when I move things into my pcie SSD I use for caching and temp storage.

I work with 8k raw video frequently for my day job and lightroom is by far the slowest app on my system my orders of magnitude.

Not saying that it is the problem here but often IOPS are the bottleneck. Your NAS may read 1GB/s sequentially but if it filled with HDD in RAID it will likely have terrible IOPS. And if you are accessing many pictures all over the platter that may be a problem.

darktable is magnitudes faster than lightroom on the same hardware and data. (maybe except for a few filters)

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