Lightroom 5 - Many Issues

I have been having MANY issues with LR5 and was wondering if others are experiencing similar problems? If you are wondering, I use a MAC with 8 GB of RAM.
• Extremely slow start up time. At least 3 times longer than LR4.
• Loading of folders on start up takes a couple of minutes (at least)
• Loading of a single image takes at least 4-5 times longer than LR4. I have changed my preview settings to medium and small and I am not noticing a real difference in the load time. I have also tried raising and lowering my default cache and again, no real difference either way. (I read these tips on a forum somewhere.)
• When viewing an image and I click on the Develop tab, many times the image will disappear for a minute or longer and has to re-load.
• Sometimes, I make a development change and the image reverts back to the original (just like I never made the change at all).
• When cropping, many times the image gets distorted looking (stretched out) for several seconds and then back to normal.
• Also when cropping, if I decide I don’t like the crop and click Reset, many times, it will not reset. I have to manually un-crop.

Again, just curious if others have experienced similar problems. I have been very unhappy with this release personally.

Kurt, I can understand your unhappiness. I've been running LR5, since it was released, on Win8 and have not experienced any of those problems.

I suggest looking at Diglloyd http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html for optimizing your Mac, and OWC http://eshop.macsales.com for buying high-quality upgrade components.

My laptop runs on 8M of ram and a 4-core processor, but I would surely need to upgrade to 16M if I was using the D800. My files are 18M and don't cause me too much grief.

The absolute best thing you can do is replace your DVD wit a 120G or 240G SSD. Use Carbon Copy or SuperDuper to make a bootable copy of your Hard drive on the SSD. Put your photos back on the Hard Drive but keep the Lightroom Catalog on the SSD. These changes cause an immense improvement in startup time, file I/O, Catalog searches, etc.

Yes, you need a backup strategy to go with two drives. SuperDuper is my fav because it does the back incrementally makes the drive bootable (on Firewire), and I always know where I put my backup directories.

After using an SSD, you will never go back.

Thanks Bill. I am wondering if maybeit is a MAC issue? I also thought it might be a folder size issue. This is the first time I have added my network drive photo folders to the library, (approx 25K shots) so now my library is really large. However, I seem to also have these issues when my network folders are not available for viewing(like when I am on someone elses WiFi, i.e., Starbucks)....so I am thinking they realy shouldn't be the cause of the slowness...

If this is an issue with Lightroom alone, I'd uninstall and re-install the lightroom program. Also, I'd make sure your LR4 has been uninstalled. I had issues with a copy on a new laptop. Once I re-installed the program, everything ran fine. The only time I have issues now is when my hard drive gets close to being full (above 80%) then I notice a slowdown when running multiple programs at the same time. ie explorer, outlook and LR

Kurt - I'm running LR5 on my mac (2.8 GHz Quad Core) with 8GB ram and OS 10.9, which I had to upgrade to when installing LR5. I have a D800 so the files are large but I've had no problems at all with LR5 in terms of speed or performance like you're describing. Perhaps it could be the number of programs you're concurrently running or how full your hard disk is, as Richard suggests.

I'm working on an older Windows 7 PC, 8 gig ram, quad-core processor. The only issues I've had with LR 5 slowing down dramatically were when I was editing images in a very large folder (1,700 photos, 40 gigabytes or more). The hard drive was near capacity as well. I freed up some space on the drive (and finished editing the images in the big folder) and haven't had further issues.

Kurt, I have 80,000 images in a single catalogue. The images are all stored on a 3TB Western Digital external drive - about 2/3 full. So, I have not found catalogue size to be an issue, yet.

Thanks everyone for the tips. I wil definitely begin working on them when I get home tonight. BTW...I have tried closing out a few programs and the only difference it seems to make on speed with mine, is when I am exporting to an external processing application (i.e., NIK or PS). Usually the only apps/programs I have running at the same time are my email, PS6 (need this as well when editing), and sometimes one or two active Safari pages.

The question and the replies all mention Lightroom 5.0. If you have not upgraded to version 5.2, that might be part of your problems.

Hi Art, I made the upgrade as soon as it was available. I actually just said LR5 and never said which version of 5 I have.