Last Updated on 07/11/2017 by Chris Gampat
Lightroom performance has been a somewhat hot button issue for years, but specifically towards the end of 2016 and now into 2017 the problem has not gotten any easier for Adobe. Lightroom performance remains troublesome for many users and competitors, like Alien Skin Exposure X2, On1 Photo RAW, and Capture One, are all offering appealing alternatives which is pulling users away from the Adobe ecosystem faster than ever before it appears.
One Lightroom problem that plagued many users recently was an issue where the whole program would crash on systems using AMD Graphics cards when the users had GPU acceleration turned on. It took longer than any user would like (we are talking months here), but Adobe worked with AMD and as of this morning AMD’s latest driver update includes a line specifically mentioning this issue is resolved. If you are running a system with an AMD based GPU then we recommend updating to the 17.7.1 driver – found on AMD’s driver website, or by using your AMD software suite to install the latest update.
It’s nice to see an issue on the Lightroom table finally get cleared up, but there is much more work to be done to get Lightroom to a good place, and Adobe realizes that. On the Lightroom Journal (essentially the Lightroom team’s blog on the Adobe website), Tom Hogarty wrote a short post about Lightroom performance or its lack thereof.
“I would like to address concerns recently voiced by our community of customers around Lightroom performance, as improving performance is our current top priority.” Hogarty writes, “We already understand many of the current pain points around GPU, import performance, certain editing tasks and review workflows and are investing heavily in improving those areas.” He goes on to mention that the Lightroom team has released many updates over the last year to improve performance, but concedes that there is still work to be done and that they are looking for community feedback to help guide them on the most pressing issues.
The blog post closes with a link to a survey Adobe is asking the community to fill out. It includes listing your personal top three performance issues, how often you use Lightroom, how many images you typically cull in a session, how many images are in your library, Mac or Windows, and other information aimed at helping them get a real pulse on the community, its pain points, and common usage scenarios.
As with all surveys, they are only as good as the people responding to them, and only valuable to Adobe in this case if a large swath of the community takes the time to answer. So if you are a Lightroom user, and you would like to see some of the performance issues that you struggle with addressed, we recommend taking the survey – which you can find here.