Yesterday Adobe released the much-hyped “speed most” update to Lightroom. The new version, which had been previously released to a number of websites in beta also has a few new features in addition to the performance improvements. So is it any good?

Well, the performance is definitely better. My ageing Mac Pro is one of the systems that has suffered for a long time with an issue that affected multi-core machines with more than 12gb of RAM. I have a 12 core Xeon, with 20gb of RAM and so I had issues with that. It’s hard to say if this is fully resolved or not, but overall it certainly feels a lot faster.

In the release notes the company claims that moving from image to image in the Library loupe module is now much faster and it certainly is. however, if you don’t have the right kind of previews generated it now loads a low-resolution pixelated version first, for a brief second, and then loads the normal view.

The release notes also claim that memory management is improved, although I don’t see it on my system. It seems to be using the same amount as before, so I don’t know. Perhaps it manages better under prolonged use and heavy loads, but in my initial testing, I haven’t noticed a major difference.

Importing and exporting have also been improved. It does seem much faster, and plenty of other sites have done timed benchmarks so I won’t bother re-doing one as you can see from the many others out there just how much faster it is. But you can definitely notice the difference. Switching from shot to shot in the develop module seems faster too.

In terms of new features, the ability to filter by edited images is pretty nice. You get a new set of icons on the filter bar (above the film strip), which lets you toggle this feature on and off. The only downside to it is that, if you apply a preset on import, it considers this an edit, and so it will flag all your images. I regularly use presets on import to set things like colour profile and so on, so this kind of makes this feature useless for me.

I also like that you can search Folders now, and the ability to create a collection from a folder is useful. Also, the ability to set folders as favourites is very handy, especially if you have a large library. I still wish they would let you create a collection set when creating a collection though. I really don’t think that’s too much to ask for. All in all, it seems like a step in the right direction. Here’s hoping they keep it up.