Last Updated on 02/15/2018 by Mark Beckenbach
The big complaint for some time now with Lightroom has been with its speed and performance issues.
Adobe took major efforts to address one of the biggest and longest-running complains about Lightroom CC Classic in their latest update, which the company dropped to users earlier today. According to the company, major effort was placed on optimizing the software to better take advantage of higher performance CPUs and larger quantities of RAM; things that in the past really had minimal effect on Lightroom’s performance after a certain point.
Lightroom CC Classic also received a general performance boost in regards to ‘Import grid loading, import and preview generation, and exporting images.’ These are all areas photographers have complained about for some time now – seemingly to deaf ears. But thanks to growing pressure from companies like Phase One (Capture One Pro), it seems that Adobe is finally feeling the urge to address the performance concerns photographers have been voicing for years.
That said, this update wasn’t all about the performance boost. Adobe has also added the ability for photographers to more easily create custom collections within Lightroom by simply selecting a specific folder in the Library. This will make it easier for photographers to, for example, set a specific folder to sync with Lightroom CC for Mobile (iOS or Android) – allowing them to more fully take advantage of the full Lightroom CC Ecosystem vs just Lightroom CC Classic.
Speaking of Lightroom CC’s ecosystem, today’s announcement also brought with it some features for the other parts of that ecosystem. Lightroom Mobile for Android, for example, now has the ability to search the Lightroom Library with Google Assistant – in theory, allowing you to quickly search for your photos of waterfalls or Aunt Sally by simply saying it – a pretty neat feature addition, if it works accurately.
The full list of today’s announced features can be found below:
- Lightroom CC Classic: Optimized CPU and memory usage so performance will scale better across multiple cores on computers with at least 12GB of RAM
- Lightroom CC Classic: Improved speed in multiple areas, including import grid loading, import and preview generation, export, and more
- Lightroom CC Classic: Instantly create collections from folders, making it easy to sync with Lightroom CC for mobile
- Lightroom CC Desktop: Now allows users to add copyright to imported images
- Lightroom CC Mobile for Android: A new Geometry tab adds powerful editing features for correcting perspective distortion (also coming soon to iOS)
- Lightroom CC Mobile for Android: The ability to search your Lightroom library with Google Assistant
- Lightroom CC Mobile for Android: The ability to add photos from your favorite apps, making it easier than ever to get all of your photos into Lightroom
As well, Adobe has a couple of blog posts detailing these updates in more detail over on their website, and you can find the blog about the overall ecosytem updates here, and the post on Lightroom CC Classic’s performance improvements, here.