Lightroom 3.6 "loading" problems

[BrianWoolf]

Trouble with Lightroom 3.6, it starts out fine but after working with it for 20 minutes to a half-hour, it gets stuck 'loading' an image. At this  point it is in a never ending loop and am unable to even force quit Lightroom, only solution is to use the 'kill switch' on the computer to shut the computer and Lightroom off. It locks up the whole thing. It has been the same thing almost every day, it works for a while and gets very confused.
Had a few odd issues that did resolved themselves, like my new Fuji X10 test images, when I tried to export them into Photoshop, with Command E, it would open Photoshop but not send the file, I had to export it manually to my desktop and then, in Photoshop open it. The following day it was working okay. Yesterday it lost my catalog, it first asked to update the catalog, I thought that this might be the problem, update the catalog and all would be fine. Not really as it made a "new catalog" composed of only the 20 images that were in the active folder of the original catalog, losing the rest of my catalog. Today it stopped loading any previews and is sitting on my desktop like a beached whale.
Could I be missing something in the install of 3.6, I was at 3.5 and that was working fine.
I am on an older Intel Duo Imac with 4gigs of ram and running OS10.5.8. Not having any problems with other software like Photoshop.

Thanks,
Brian Woolf

[David Hufford]

This will be mostly useless information for your problem I am sure, but I had somewhat similar problems on my Mac. LR 3.6 would often have blank previews on the film strip which was a hint it would soon slow and then lock up while loading and require a force quit. It occurred 4-5 times, but fortunately did not damage my catalog. I reverted back to 3.5 and have no problems. There were a few threads on the Adobe Lightroom forums about this typ of problem, but no solutions (at least the last time I checked a few days ago. Your problem seems much worse than others have had though.

[Steve Weldon]

When was the last time you did a SMART test of your hard drives?  There are several ways to do this, one of the easiest being to google and download Speedfan and use their SMART feature.. it almost sounds like the hard drive is having issues.

[kaelaria]

I agree sounds like a failing drive.

[meyerweb]

Might very well be a drive problem, but there seem to be quite a few bugs in the Mac version of 3.6. You might consider re-installing 3.5 and see if the problems go away.  If so, it's not likely the HD.

[BrianWoolf]

Thanks for the hard drive spotlight, in a manner of speaking it was a hard drive problem. One of my firewire cables had become slightly unseated and was not making a 100% connection. Reseating the cables fixed the problem.

Well, I thought it did. Now all the previews in the filmstrip seem to come up but a single selected image goes into loading lock. As I have multiple hard drives, I selected a different and newer hard drive and still the same problem. At around the 20 to 30 minute mark, I start getting this problem. I had scanned thru about 10 folders with about 100 to 200 images in each, before the problem began. I can't believe that I have two hard drives that aren't working correctly.

So it's either LR 3.6 or possibly the firewire 6 hub that the drives go thru on the way to the computer.

Thanks,
Brian Woolf

[aebolzan]

For your information, I found the same problem: LR 3.6 was "loading" my images for...ever....and not only that: importing files from my card took about 1-2 hours!! I went back to LR 3.5 and seemingly I have no problems (I still need to test importing files, but I have no new images to import at the moment).....

Agustin

[Steve House]

Interesting you're having such an issue.  My own experience in going from LR3.5 to LR3.6 on a WinXP platform is that 3.6 is marginally faster in loading and editing files as well as importing and exporting. Go figure

[NikoJorj]

Well, I thought it did. Now all the previews in the filmstrip seem to come up but a single selected image goes into loading lock. As I have multiple hard drives, I selected a different and newer hard drive and still the same problem. At around the 20 to 30 minute mark, I start getting this problem. I had scanned thru about 10 folders with about 100 to 200 images in each, before the problem began. I can't believe that I have two hard drives that aren't working correctly.

Did you try optimizing the catalog?

[BrianWoolf]

Thanks for the tip about Optimizing the catalog, I did that and got about 45 minutes before the loading problems began, At that point, I forced quit LR and restarted my computer and was able to work for a short while.
I did notice another problem, assigning 1 to 5 stars, they don't show up on the border of the image. If I add 2 stars to an image, the bar above shows two stars 'lit' and 3 grayed out, but nothing appears on the border of the photo that has two stars. If I return to that image, the 2 stars are still 'lit' in the bar above.
When the 'loading problems' begin, I can switch to photoshop and almost instantly open the image that LR is trying to load, with no problems. So this seems to me to be a LR problem and will have to go back to LR 3.5 to avoid the headaches,

Brian Woolf