I'm gonna say it

[NicoleScraps]

I hate Lightroom. There, finally got that off my chest. I have LR3, 64 bit, running on 64 bit windows 7 with 4g of ram, but it runs so slow that I get pissed off, quit what I am doing, and switch over the PSE. I. Hate. It!!! It takes several seconds to switch from one photo to another, and any edit that I do does not show up immediately. I get that twirly "loading" thing on the photo. And it takes a REALLY long time to export. It took two hours to export 100 photos.
So, is this program supposed to be this slow or is something wrong with mine? I am about ready to stop using it altogether and just use PSE. I can do almost all of the same stuff anyways and anything that I do in PSE is INSTANT. Just I can't view all of the photos at once in PSE like you can in LR, which is the only thing that keeps me hanging in there with the program.

[dlambert]

In my experience, both LR and PSE take a fair bit of oomph to run well. Lots of RAM (8G) and an SSD for Windows & program files helps. I'm sure there are performance tweaks, but it's passable for me right now.

[RLucas]

Do you have a bunch of background progams running? I am using a 4 year old laptop with Win7 32 bit, and 4gigs of RAM, and it is not nearly that slow. The only time I have issues with lag, is when it reads my card to import. It takes about 30 seconds for all the thumbnails to show up. It zips through the export pretty quick too, but they are generally resized for web.

[Rentham]

I run LR on an iMac from 2005 that is maxed out with 3GB of RAM. I'm processing 5D Mark II files, usually an average of about 300-500 from a shoot. I don't experience the problems and wait times that you are, so I'm going to guess it may be something you are doing to slow things down.

The biggest (by far) difference maker is NOT turning lens correction on before you are ready to export. I render 1:1 previews on import, as I'd rather wait then instead of when I'm trying to do an edit. I also increased the size of my preview cache quite a bit. I try to be judicious with my local adjustments. If you're ending up with dozens of local adjustment pins all over your image, you're doing it wrong. Just take the sucker into photoshop because it obviously needs a lot of manipulation.

Exporting can take a while for me as well. But the more you ask LR to do on export, like resize and sharpen, the longer it will take. You'll notice if you do a straight export of a full size jpg without sharpening it is very fast.

The real power of LR is in helping you manage your library and workflow. I make heavy use of features like Survey and Compare while culling images to make my selects. I ask LR to do a bunch of stuff on Import that helps keep my digital asset management automated. I batch process RAW adjustments as much as I can. I make extensive use of Keywording, Meta Info, and Collections.

[zona5101]

Take a look at your Task Manager and see what else is tying up your resources... I bet there's tons of stuff running in the background...

[karen_s]

I am on a four year old iMac with 4g of ram ... works pretty well for me. Are you regularly optimizing your catalogue?

Here are some other things to look at ...

Tutorial: Boosting Lightroom Performance | Lightroom tutorials, tips and training for Lightroomers!

[NicoleScraps]

I guess part of the problem is that I don't fully understand LR yet. I am pretty swift with PS though, been using it for much longer and am much more comfortable with it.
I guess I need to take some time to figure all of this stuff out so that I can use it fully.
Thanks everyone!

[Krusty79]

Originally Posted by zona5101

Take a look at your Task Manager and see what else is tying up your resources... I bet there's tons of stuff running in the background...

You can also go to your windows command prompt, type "msconfig" to bring up the System Configuration screen and click the Startup tab to see what programs and processes your pc boots up with. There's usually a lot of crap in there...