Pixioo Photography: Adobe Admits Lightroom is Slow, Says Speeding It Up Is Top Priority

Tuesday, 11 July 2017

Adobe Admits Lightroom is Slow, Says Speeding It Up Is Top Priority

If you’re a photographer who’s frustrated with Lightroom running slowly (even on a powerful computer), you’re not alone — it’s a struggle shared by many, many people who use the program. But hope may be on the horizon. Adobe has just taken the rare step of publicly admitting Lightroom’s performance issues and says fixing it is the company’s top priority.

In a blog post titled “On Lightroom Performance” and published to Lightroom Journal, Adobe Photo Product Manager Tom Hogarty writes that Adobe isn’t unaware of or ignoring Lightroom’s speed issues:

I would like to address concerns recently voiced by our community of customers around Lightroom performance, as improving performance is our current top priority. We have a history, starting with our first public beta, of working with our customers to address workflow and feature needs, and we’d like to take that same approach regarding your performance concerns. 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.

Adobe also wants to hear what you think and what you’d like Lightroom to be faster at.

“Over the past year we’ve added numerous enhancements to address your performance concerns but we understand we will have a lot of work to do to meet your expectations,” Hogarty writes. “If you have feedback or would like to work with the Lightroom team on your most pressing issues, please fill out this survey.”

In the survey, Adobe is collecting usage and performance information, as well as asking each user for 3 specific performance issues they’re dealing with.

Here’s an example given: “Adjustment brush after about the 10th adjustment is slow, particularly after using a preset.”

Photographers have been grumbling about years about Lightroom performance issues, so this latest news and survey should be a welcome and encouraging development after such a long period of radio silence from Adobe.