Some photographers like to live on the bleeding edge of the technology, and some other photographers like to wear both belt and suspenders. I’m more on the belt and suspenders side than on the bleeding edge. That’s why I like to have the metadata stored in both the Lightroom catalog and the XMP files: Edit > Preferences > Metadata > Automatically write changes into XMP.

The problem is that sometimes Lightroom …

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Usually, when importing photos into a Lightroom catalog, the Do No Import Duplicates is checked on. The question is what’s a duplicate? Everybody in their right mind would assume that 2 duplicate photos are 2 identical photos. It turns out that for programmers, 2 identical photos are not the same as 2 identical files.

What Lightroom really mean is 2 identical files. What are identical files?

• The same name …

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A friend and customer recently spend “muchos dinaros” on a top of the line laptop. iCore 7, a real ATI video card… By the time it was all said and done with Microsoft Office 2010… $2,000+ Whew! Lots of money. Andrei asked me how he could move his Lightroom/Photoshop and his data from his computer to the laptop.

1. Backups, backups and backups
2. Install Photoshop
3. Install Lightroom
4. Restore the …

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Lightroom stores all the metadata (data about the data) in its own database, but Lightroom can also store all of that metadata in the “sidecar”, the XMP file.

Lightroom compares the data in its database with the data from the sidecar. If the data is different from its own database, then you will get:

By pressing on the notice (circled in red), you will get …

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A friend/customer of mine, Rich, was having problems with his Lightroom. It was as fast as molasses on a cold day.

I tried to help him over the phone, no luck. Time for TeamViewer. It’s some software so I can log onto his computer without having me to drive there.

Yes, it was slow, it was very slow. A quick looking around, nothing too obvious. Switching to the …

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Lightroom can either be as slow as molasses or it can fly. It mostly depends on how you work. So let see some of the ways you can grind Lightroom to a halt.

1. Add and delete photos, videos… What do you mean? Adding photos will slow down the Lightroom. Yes! A catalog with 0 photo, that’s a zero, is blindingly fast. Not useful but… Since the catalog with all …

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I got an emergency phone call from Patrick, a photographer friend:

…
Marc — Help! My Lightroom’s dead. Everything crawls, it’s so slow, it’s been an hour in it has only exported a dozen of photos. I need to be finished by tonight, I have to post the photos, tonight.
Me — Are you running anything else?
Marc — No, I made sure of that.
Me — Are you connected to the …

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Yesterday, I got a phone call from Alice, a friend, complaining about how slow her Lightroom has become. She uses Mac and I’m a Windows guy. She wanted me to come, I wasn’t too keen, she uses Mac and I’m no Mac expert. I can identify the screen, the mouse and the keyboard but what about the right clicks on a Mac? Nothing that important yesterday so …

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