Rodney Campbell's Blog

Lately I’ve been dealing with some serious frustration with Adobe Lightroom. I’ve had so many issues and in the end after trying many things to attempt to solve my problems I’ve given up in frustration and rolled back to the previous stable version of Lightroom (6.11).

If you want to cut to the chase and just learn how to do the rollback then those follow right now. Read after if you want to know the back story and a good list of very useful techniques to try and optimise Lightroom performance…

How to Rollback to Lightroom 6.1.1 or CC 2015.1

The instructions below refer to both the standalone Lightroom 6 and the Creative Cloud 2015.

1) Uninstall Lightroom 6.2.
On Mac, in Finder go to Applications -> Adobe Lightroom -> Uninstall Adobe Lightroom.
On Windows, use the Add/Remove Programs feature.

2) Download Lightroom 6.0.
You will need to download two files. You need both the Adobe Lightroom 6.0 Installer (Lightroom_6_LS_11 file) and also the Lightroom 6.1.1/2015.1.1 updater.

3) Run the Lightroom 6.0 Installer. If you are an Adobe CC subscriber when it requires you to sign in with your Adobe ID, it will determine if you are a CC subscriber; and if so, it will enable the Dehaze feature.

4) Run the Lightroom 6.1.1 Patch Updater.

Needless to say if you are an Adobe CC member you should NOT run the Lightroom updater in the Creative Cloud Manager.

What Lightroom Frustration?

When Adobe released Lightroom 6.2 I dutifully updated Lightroom soon after the Creative Cloud Manager said an update was available.

Actually at that time no massive frustration actually occurred – unlike a number of other people I was having no major issues with 6.2. Perhaps it did run a tiny fraction sluggish at times (e.g. when doing lots of adjustment brush edits or laying down lots of Spot Removal tool pins) however I’ve experienced those before with previous versions.

The only real frustration with 6.2 was the changed import tool and the removal of features I used (like Move).

So eventually Adobe released the “fix” which came in the form of 6.2.1 and my upgrade again was smooth.

What I didn’t account for was upgrading my operating system to Apple‘s new OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

Here is where disaster struck and the frustration really begins…

Some Symptoms:

– sometimes Lightroom would just appear to hang.
– sometimes some parts of the UI didn’t work as expected/supposed to.
– sometimes very laggy UI/stuff doesn’t refresh properly (seconds to minutes to wake up).
for example in the Library module when attempting to click on one of those little triangles to open up a folder of images – it would just not do it
likewise in the develop module clicking on one of the triangles on the right to open up a develop panel – nothing…
also going into the Library View Options and attempting to change certain preference settings – nothing – or you’d have to wait a minute for the change to take effect.
– sometimes the cursor would turn into that little line with the up and down arrows (like you’re trying to resize a panel) and you then couldn’t click on most of the UI items – however you could still click on images in grid mode and change modes.
– sometimes right click would stop working.
– sometimes that larger message text overlay (e.g. when you go into full screen mode and it says to press Command F to get out) which appears in the bottom middle of the screen would come up but not ever go away (even when you switch between modules, etc).
– sometimes you couldn’t get to the menu bar at the top of the screen at all.

often the fix for the above would be to quit Lightroom and restart and it would work again for a little while until one of the above wierdnesses would happen and then it would be all over.

– sometimes Lightroom would hang on quit (and you’d then have to force quit).

What Did I Try to Fix This

I’m sorry Adobe – I really did try to do the right thing and get your software to work. However some combination of both your 6.2.X software and Apple’s El Capitan really doesn’t mix well!

So I spent a number of days in frustration pulling my hair out trying to fix this thing or at least getting it to be somewhat stable and usable.

Things I tried to resolve the issues – none of which worked. However these are all very good things to know because many of these techniques are designed to both optimise and improve Lightroom performance in general.

1) Deleting the Lightroom Catalog Previews file (Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata) (and restarting Lightroom – and sigh… letting Lightroom rebuild previews…).

2) File -> Optimise Catalog…

3) Starting Lightroom whilst holding down Opt (Alt) Shift and reseting the Lightroom Preferences.

This was very painful as I had to redo so many things to get back to my normal workflow. It doesn’t just reset all the settings in Lightroom -> Preferences… I also had to re-licence and re-authorise many of my Lightroom Plugins and Web Templates (I use quite a few from Jeffrey Friedl, Timothy Armes and others). I also had to redo all my settings for the UI and the Develop Panels and the Adjustment Brushes and so forth. I’m still not sure I’ve got everything back to normal.

4) Un-installing and re-installing Lightroom (using the Creative Cloud Manager).

5) Lightroom (Mac) or Edit (PC) -> Preferences, and on the General tab, uncheck “Show Add Photos”.

6) Lightroom (Mac) or Edit (PC) -> Preferences, and on the Performance tab, uncheck “Use Graphics Processor”.

7) Lightroom (Mac) or Edit (PC) -> Preferences, and on the File Handling tab, increase the Camera RAW Cache Settings to much larger values (e.g. 20GB, 50GB).

8) Clear History for a large set of images from my Catalog.

I currently have 132,685 images in my Catalog and my Lightroom Catalog.lrcat file was sitting at 22.5GB!. I selectively pared this down to 17.9GB (and I could definitely do more). I’ll write up a separate blog post on this technique because it is quite useful and somewhat unknown, and provides a good way to clean up some of that cruft which can build up in your Catalog file.

Anyway – now that I’ve rolled back to 6.1.1 (CC 2015.1) my frustration has ended and all seems back to somewhat “normal” in my Lightroom world…