A couple LR questions from a Bridge lover.

[Redcrown]

I'm a long time Photoshop and Bridge user. Bridge meets all my needs. But about once a year I look at Lightroom, just to see what I might be missing. Just did it again with the new 2018 version. Two things baffle me. Can the LR lovers enlighten me?

1. LR seems to be a memory hog. I can bounce around in Bridge, navigating several folders, making camera raw adjustments, etc., and the Windows Task Manager shows it peaking at about 400mb of memory. I do the same with LR and that sucker bloats up to 3.5 GIGAbytes! Is there some config/preference trick I'm missing?

2. Bridge automatically "imports". Just point it at a virgin folder of images and it crunches away caching thumbs and previews. When it's done, it's done, and it tells you it's done. Scroll thru images and the thumbs are all there in final version, ready to use.

With LR, I import 200 images and give it plenty of time to finish. Hard to tell because there is no "progress" bar, so I wait 10+ minutes. Then start scrolling down the thumbs in Library. As I scroll, the thumbs "blink" at me as they change from some temporary version to the true version. Looks like LR does not bother to make good thumbs until you actually view them. Is there some preference, config parameter I'm missing that makes LR finish the job while I do something else, so everything is ready when I go to work?

[rdonson]

1) The two aren't remotely the same in functionality. 

2) Bridge doesn't "import" anything.  It's basically a file browser.

If Bridge meets all your needs stay with it. 

[MattBurt]

I'm a long time Photoshop and Bridge user. Bridge meets all my needs. But about once a year I look at Lightroom, just to see what I might be missing. Just did it again with the new 2018 version. Two things baffle me. Can the LR lovers enlighten me?

1. LR seems to be a memory hog. I can bounce around in Bridge, navigating several folders, making camera raw adjustments, etc., and the Windows Task Manager shows it peaking at about 400mb of memory. I do the same with LR and that sucker bloats up to 3.5 GIGAbytes! Is there some config/preference trick I'm missing?

No, it's a hog.

2. Bridge automatically "imports". Just point it at a virgin folder of images and it crunches away caching thumbs and previews. When it's done, it's done, and it tells you it's done. Scroll thru images and the thumbs are all there in final version, ready to use.

With LR, I import 200 images and give it plenty of time to finish. Hard to tell because there is no "progress" bar, so I wait 10+ minutes. Then start scrolling down the thumbs in Library. As I scroll, the thumbs "blink" at me as they change from some temporary version to the true version. Looks like LR does not bother to make good thumbs until you actually view them. Is there some preference, config parameter I'm missing that makes LR finish the job while I do something else, so everything is ready when I go to work?

In LR there is usually a progress bar (or multiple bars) in the upper left part of the window for background tasks like importing or generating previews.
If there are multiple small ones, clicking on them will show you more info.


The generation of varying levels or preview is set in the import dialog. You can no previews or a couple different levels of preview generated at import time, including Smart Previews which are handy if you want to work on an image when the original is offline. I usually go for standard previews to balance import time with on the fly previews that may need to be generated later.

That delay you mention is probably an on the fly preview being generated because it wasn't generated on import. If your computer isn't really fast, this can be a slow process either at import or later.

[Redcrown]

MattBurt, thanks for the help. I'm so used to looking for progress bars at the botttom of a screen I missed the LR version. And now I understand LR previews.

rdonson, you don't know Bridge.