Lightroom Classic used to have a terrible reputation for performance. Certainly, older versions of the software had some serious speed issues, but over the past few years, Adobe has worked to improve the responsiveness of the application. It’s now it’s a far cry from the way it used to be. However, If you have a modern computer, and you’re still experiencing a slowdown with Lightroom, there are a handful of common issues that could be causing it.

One of the things that I’ve come across when corresponding with readers, is that some people seem to have major problems with the performance in Capture One, while others, like myself, have never had any issues with the speed of the software. Specifically, I often see people complaining that when they move a slider they have to wait a second for the display to update. This is not the normal performance of Capture One, and so if you’re experiencing this, then something is definitely wrong.

Here's a very quick Lightroom tip for you. One of the frustrating things about the way Lightroom's preview system works is that it only generates previews when you tell it to, usually upon import. As soon as you make any changes to an image, the preview for that image is lost. In order to make sure you can keep browsing through your library speedily, it's important to periodically re-build previews.

I've written a few posts lately about ways to speed up Lightroom, and there's one more that may seem counterintuitive at first. If you have a lot of develop module presets installed, it can slow down Lightroom. It doesn't just slow down Lightroom in the Develop Module either, it slows it down the whole application. Even if you're just in the Library. I had written about this before, and I had thought that this "bug" was fixed ages ago. On an official forum, an Adobe rep said that this was to be fixed in Lightroom 6, but it still seems to be an issue.