The saga of Lightroom updating has been going on for several days. I am happy to report that things seem to be working with the new version. It was a very long and trying process. I did learn a lot during my adventures.

The one thing I wanted to preserve during the upgrade was the many smart collections I have developed over the years. If I just went on and imported all my photos into the new Lightroom, the smart collection parameters would be lost. The smart collection data is stored in the catalog rather than with all the other presets. that meant that unless I could somehow manage to import old stuff into the new stuff, I would be screwed.

There is a workaround that serves well. I simply exported a single file in a new catalog. I used the new Lightroom and converted and imported that small catalog and VOILA, the smart collection parameters came along with it. Now all I had to do was import all the other 202,000 images. How hard can that be? Well, it turns out that if you try to import all of them at once, the thing runs for a while then gets terminally bogged down in reading and writing to pagefile.sys. That is a file that Windows uses when it runs out of RAM. Exchanging data to a disk is a lot slower that with RAM.

I tried a little experiment of importing only a few thousand images and everything went fine. With that in mind I did two things. First, I went and started using my other computer which has 16 Gig of RAM rather than 8. Second, I started doing it in 10,000 image chunks. It worked smoothly. Very tedious. The last transfer I tried (successfully) was about 20,000 images. I watched the process unfold with Task manager. When the command is issued, Lightroom goes into some kind of thinking mode that has CPU running near 100% and at the same time starts consuming RAM. In this particular case I got lucky because the RAM utilization peaked at 95%. After a short time the CPU and RAM usage drop and disk activity starts. It takes a while for the images to be imported and a real long time for the standard previews to be made. I spent quite a bit of time watching the process. It was worth it. Now I know some stuff.

Today's photo is the splash screen for Lightroom Classic CC, the new one. I liked the old one better. It was a nice purple flower.