(Mar 26, 2011, 01:32)wulinka Wrote: Hey all,
I feel a bit like a Dinosaur, but I am still using Lightroom 1.3... Now my MacBook (Pro) has been getting slower and slooower and slooooower when starting up and I at least to some degree blame it on Lightroom. Someone, I think even here on Shuttertalk, said you could clean up Lightroom in some way, deleting cached stuff etc. I looked through its folders, and one thing I found is hundreds of backups of catalogues. Do I really need all of them, or isn't the most recent enough?
What else can I possibly through out?
Thanks for advise and happy spring time to you all,
Uli
Hi. I also have a mac, older version, it was slow once I put LR, PS, Painter12 on it. Here is what I did:
I checked to see if the OS could be upgraded. I did upgrade to the new Maverick which speeded things up considerably. Then, I installed the max RAM I could. Wow, the speed is way better. Soon will be installing more space.
An important thing to know, is whenever we add more to our hard drive, ie, importing your images, it automatically wants to go to Pictures folder on your hard drive. What I would do, is check INFO on the MAC Hard drive. It will tell you how much space is left. (At one point I only had 25 G left). According to Mac specialists, one needs to have at least 50 G of space in order for the mac to run properly and faster. If it is less then that, and you have softwares that need both space and RAM to operate, then the mac will run slow, slower (the more images are imported) to super slow.
1. My techie friend told me to back up all files out of mac and put to an external. Check the INFO of the many inside folders you have in the mac, Pictures, iTunes, iPhoto, etc to see how much space these are taking up on your HD.
So I laboriously put the images, the tunes, the podcasts, the videos in a similar structure on my external drive. Then trashed the ones I had slid over, emptied trash.
You wouldn't believe how much space I had created. This made a huge difference.
2. Next on the list is determine which software programs you aren't using that take up space on your hard drive. You can slide them over to your external/ flash drive, if not sure if you want to delete them, then uninstall = more space.
3. When using any software like Lightroom, Photoshop, quit all other programs such as Skype (large resource hog), and make sure your internet browser doesn't have many windows open.
When I went deep into the mac's "monitor" Chrome uses ALOT of memory and uses alot of RAM. Safari not so much. So I use Safari mostly. Not sure about Internet Explorer or Firefox. Perhaps there are other Mac users that can share the logistics of freeing up space so the computer runs smoother.
The above have worked for me.
Do check with a mac specialist, ask questions so you understand how the mac works with regards to freeing up space and speed and which programs need to stay in the OS and which are options (which you may not be using).
Flash drives and externals have come down in price the past year - buy them when on sale.
Hope this helps & good luck,
