Speed up Lightroom Classic by reinstalling it

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Lightroom Classic on my work computer has been running terribly for ages. Starting it up alone takes more than a minute, and editing photos is very slow too. Today I finally made the effort to simply reinstall the programme.

I mainly edit my photos on my home computer, which is why I kept putting it off. But Lightroom Classic was actually unusable this way. The initial installation was already years old, with updates added time and again, and I had also used it to try out various plug-ins.

Is your Lightroom Classic unusually slow too? These are the steps I took to solve it:

Back up your catalogue
First of all, I made a back-up of my current catalogue. For safety and clarity, I put it in a different folder from the one my back-ups normally go to.

Remove Lightroom Classic
The next step was to start the Adobe Creative Cloud app and remove Lightroom Classic from my PC. Click the three dots and choose 'remove'. In the follow-up dialogue, I chose not to keep 'my notifications, warnings, interface settings, plug-ins and other preferences'. After all, I wanted a clean installation.

Restart
To be on the safe side, I restarted my computer afterwards. This prevents any files from still being 'in use'.

Remove files
Even after you remove Lightroom Classic, many files remain on your computer. I therefore removed those manually as well. This was the folder in question (on Windows):

/Users/[gebruikersnaam]/AppData/Local/Adobe/Lightroom

Note! This also contained my automatic back-ups. That is also why I had saved the most recent back-up somewhere else.

If everything is as it should be, your photos will not be here too, but it does no harm to check. My photos themselves are on a different drive. Obviously, you do not want to delete your photos by accident.

Not sure about this? Rename the Lightroom folder to 'Lightroom-old' (or something similar) and delete the folder once the new installation is working.

This folder was much larger than expected. With more than 114 gigabytes of data and over 240,000 separate files, it certainly cleared things up.

Restart
Probably not strictly necessary, but to be on the safe side I restarted my computer once more.

Reinstall Lightroom Classic
Open the Adobe Creative Cloud app and install Lightroom Classic again.

Restore the back-up
When Lightroom creates a back-up of your catalogue, it does so in a .zip file. I copied the files from it back to the new Lightroom Classic folder. This is on my main drive, which is also my fastest drive.

Open the restored catalogue
After starting Lightroom Classic, choose to open your existing catalogue. Your files will then be back just as you are used to.

After reinstalling it, Lightroom Classic was running smoothly again for me. I should have done this months ago.

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