I have been using LR since 2 was released. I downloaded LR4 the day it hit the market. And I am a HUGE fan of LR. It does most everything I need. Especially for handling large volumes of photos. 1000s of them from event photography. I regularly will shoot events with 10,000 photos and process all of the files in some way before uploading them to my smugmug site. I was excited for some of the new features of LR4. Mostly for soft proofing. And for the new adjustment powers.

Pros:

1. Soft proofing
2. Much better detail out of my RAW files in every way. Shadows, Highlights and even colors
3. I like the new slider functions
4. Much better masking for the adjustment brushes
5. Clarity looks much more like the high pass filter in PS this is really nice.

Cons:
Slow as hell for anything requiring an export. This means burning CDs or uploading to the internet straight out of LR.


I didn't notice a significant speed issue when using LR to import and adjust photos. IF there is any lag here it is minimal. Where I notice this speed issue is on upload and export. How slow? Here is an example. To upload a 60pic gallery to Smugmug using Jeffery's uploader plugin was going to take 59min. Using LR3 with the same gallery and Jeffery's plugin 5min shown on the status bar. A 114 image gallery said it was going to take 4.5 hrs in LR4. LR3 plowed through this gallery in about 8min. So for some people these times might be OK. For me, I am uploading 4500 images from a motocross........... This is fricken ridiculous.


Trying to export to a folder is a similar experience. It is very slow. A 50 image gallery takes maybe 5min. Once done the Smugmug uploader can suck those files to the site in minutes. But this is also not a good solution because of the speed of the export. A 600 image CD would take quite a long time.


I ended up abandoning ship on LR4 and going back to LR3 to upload this gallery. Luckily LR3 read the metadata of 4 and our number plate tags were intact. What a huge waste of time. I called my ISP, tech supported like crazy with SM, messed with computers. I tried it all for 2 days straight. I was freaking out because of this. It would have taken me 2 weeks to load this stuff and that would mean no sales. I will be done tonight with my trusty LR3.


Adobe should be ashamed. This speed is a joke. How is it OK for them to downgrade a software in this way. Yes there is some benefit to this program, but it doesn't outweigh killing one of the programs key uses. Why would I need to build a hotrod computer to get maybe? the same performance of 3?

FWIW... My experience has been the opposite. I find it to be slightly quicker than LR3, even on export, however I am running an i7 w/ 16GB of RAM. I'll do a bit more testing and report back if I find anything different.

I just uploaded 600 very large JPG files from my 5DII/7D in about 40 mins from LR4/SmugMug Publish feature. I can't say that LR4 is slower, I'm sorry!

What system are you running Andy? Here is my basic spec on the system I tried LR4.

Lenovo x201 Laptop Win 7 64bit
Intel Core i5 2.67GHz
8gb RAM

Not the best but no slouch. I haven't tried with my desktop yet with the big graphics card.

Just a shot in the dark as I haven't uploaded through LR4 yet (still figuring it out and trying to correct 4 years of bad cataloging through Bridge), but have you tried SmugMug's own upload plug-in? Mayhaps, Jeffery's upload plug-in hasn't been updated to the new LR4 architecture yet...?

I noticed that LR4 is somewhat slower generating previews when zooming to 100% compared to LR3. Maybe it's because my entire library (30k photos) was just converted to LR4 ?

This might help somewhat, this also pertains to building previews, to speed displaying an image. Hope it helps
Optimizing Lightroom for Best Performance: Top Ten Lightroom Speed Tips


http://thelightroomlab.com/2009/07/o...om-speed-tips/

Originally Posted by novicesnapper This might help somewhat, this also pertains to building previews, to speed displaying an image. Hope it helps Optimizing Lightroom for Best Performance: Top Ten Lightroom Speed Tips http://thelightroomlab.com/2009/07/o...om-speed-tips/

This does not help with this problem. I need to try the SM pluggin. I tried it when it first came out and wasn't a fan. But that was a while ago too. I need to see if it speeds up LR4 on upload. For some reason I am thinking it has more to do with the export process than anything. LR exports each file to a temporary folder before uploading. This saves your changes so the world sees what you see.

I still want to hear from Andy about his system?

Originally Posted by Zerodog I still want to hear from Andy about his system?

I doubt it's system related.

Not apples to apples there. Mac and that thing is looking pretty rippin. Double the memory I have. I think it is probably memory related.

I have wondered why the Mac LR download is so much smaller than the PC.

I posted that for Manfr3d, to show how to optimize catalogs and pre build previews. Feel free to edit my posts right on out of here lol. Have you notified Adobe of this, for possible work arounds?

Originally Posted by novicesnapper I posted that for Manfr3d, to show how to optimize catalogs and pre build previews. Feel free to edit my posts right on out of here lol. Have you notified Adobe of this, for possible work arounds?

Thanks! I figured I just rebuild all previews and see how it goes then. The system should be
fast enough (16gb, quadcore 2.93ghz i7).

Saw that LR 4.1 is to be posted 'this week' to address performance issues and add support for the 5DmkIII...
Looks like I'll finally be ready to update from 3.6 (I was scared off from the lost curve tone and other settings that happened with the initial catalog migration to 4.0)

I a having no speed issues with LR 4.0 running on a MBP with the system and LR w/ previews on an SSD 3G drive and the catalog on another internal HD.

Scrolling and importing is quite fast.

Don

Originally Posted by DonRicklin I a having no speed issues with LR 4.0 running on a MBP with the system and LR w/ previews on an SSD 3G drive and the catalog on another internal HD. Scrolling and importing is quite fast. Don

Yeah for me importing, scrolling, previewing and general running of LR is fine. Pretty much as it was with 3. The exporting to web is what is killing me. Exporting in general is just slower, a lot slower.........at least with my computer.

Have you looked around for tips on improving performance? There have been a few for other Adobe products that have made a difference.

I've not noticeable difference. I exported several hundred 60mp images to 16bit tif files from raw yesterday, overall the time was roughly the same as LR3. Uploading to Smugmug and flickr have been no different than LR3 (then again my internet is snail-slow to begin with).

FWIW, I love LR4. I find it pronouncedly faster than LR3 on all fronts. Import, develop, export. Uploading to Smugmug is the same in my opinion, I use the LR plugin for uploading as well.

May want to try out the new LR 4.1 Release Candidate: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4-1/

Addressed performance issues in Lightroom 4, particularly when loading GPS track logs, using a secondary monitor, and the controls within the Develop module.

Also supports 5DMkIII if you are so lucky