Getting the most out of your Solid State Drive in Lightroom

I recently got myself a new iMac. I decided to bite the bullet and got one with a 256 GB Solid State Drive. Here’s how I configured my Lightroom worklow to get as much mileage from the SSD as possible, without filling it up needlessly:

• Lightroom (as well as the other applications) are installed on the SSD. It starts up incredibly fast, as a result of this. But that’s not the real time-saver.
• More importantly, I put my Catalogs and Previews the SSD. Generally, I advocate using only one Catalog, but for the moment I have two. That’s because last year’s Portraits Of Asia Catalog hasn’t been imported into my Master Catalog yet. Anyway. If you want to move a Catalog to another drive, make sure you close Lightroom first and that you have made a recent backup (just in case). Then, make sure to move not only the .lrcat file, but also the corresponding previews.lrdata file. Upon your next startup of Lightroom, you will have to manually navigate to your moved Catalog. Moving your Catalog to an SSD helps speed up things quite a lot. As a database, Lightroom has to perform a continuous stream of read-write movements, and the faster your disk, the faster it will run.

• Thirdly, I also put the ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) Cache on the SSD, and I changed the size from the standard 1 GB to 50 GB. You can change the location and the size of the Camera Raw cache in the File Handling tab of the Lightroom Preferences. This cache is especially important while in the Develop Module. Without getting too far into it, the ACR cache holds the first stage of the development of a raw file. Enlarging it, means that more ‘partially developed’ raw files can be stored in the cache, meaning Lightroom has to go less often to the actual raw file themselves. Putting it on a faster drive means that Lightroom not only has to go less far for the data, but gets there quicker, too. Enlarging the cache is like a company building a bigger warehouse to store it’s supplies.  Putting the cache on an SSD is like moving the supplies from the warehouse to the factory not by train, but by plane. (Unfortunately, the analogy also holds true for the costs involved: SSD’s are a lot more expensive than normal drives). This brings us to the last part of my workflow.

• So what about the actual photographs? With over 40.000 files (including a couple of thousand heavily layered TIFFs that can ‘weigh’ up to 1 gigabyte), it’s not possible to store all of my photographs on a 256 GB SSD. As my previews are already on the SSD, the main speed boost I can get from putting the files themselves on the SSD is in the Develop Module. So, I import new photographs to the SSD, in a dated subfolder of a parent folder called LightroomWorkInProgress. When I’m done developing, I just drag the folder – in Lightroom – to my Drobo, freeing up space on the SSD for new projects. If I were to import pictures from a shoot, and I’d know that I wouldn’t process them right away, I’d import them to the Drobo and move them to the SSD when I’d finally be ready to start processing.

Of course, there are as many Lightroom workflows as there are photographers. So how ‘bout you? Do you have any Lightroom file management tips that speed up your workflow?