So here I am at 11 p.m. organizing some images after upgrading my Lightroom Classic to 8.3, and I see on the top of my Mac’s menu bar a giant block of blue. You see, I’m running a little tool called iStat Menu, a hardware monitoring tool that shows nerds, like myself, temperatures, CPU activity, Read/write speeds and so forth. On that wonderful menu bar, I see all 20 threads of my Mac Pro’s processor being used.

I scrambled for a bit as I tried to recall what I had Lightroom do — I had moved a bunch of images, moved catalogs around, cleared previews and eventually tasked it to build standard previews for about 2500 raw pictures. That … that right there was what was setting off all the cpu threads!

Look at that screenshot. Lightroom is using 1919.2% of the available 2000% (100% x 20 threads)!? I got so excited that I ended up texting my local photographer’s group chat right away … and yeah, that was around 11 p.m.

Has Adobe finally improved performance in Lightroom Classic in this update? I honestly can’t tell since I’ve made so many changes to my personal library. I’ve moved all my working photos onto a 2TB RAID 0 portable SSD hard drive along with a Lightroom Catalog — risky, I know, so thankfully it makes a backup copy straight to my aging Drobo 5D. With those changes, I can’t really tell how much performance is being gained — but I will say that it did pretty dang well in my opinion with 2500 standard images, as it finished in just under 15 minutes.

What do you think? Did Lightroom finally speed up for you, or is it just taking more resources? Let’s discuss this and let Adobe know about the performance we’ve been demanding!