Lightroom Speed Up
My PC has Raid 5 for the main data disks and that makes it fairly slow to write to disk. This meant I really wanted to move the Lightroom cache, but not the database on to another disk. Well today I managed it.
Firstly I found an article about using symbolic linked drives on the Mac, which lead me to search for a tool to do the same under windows. I found Junction there are a few limitations in that you need to be using NTFS as a file system, but I was so I crossed my fingers and did the deed.
- Make sure Lightroom is NOT running.
- Move the “Lightroom Database Previews.lrdata/” directory to the new hard drive.
- Put the Junction exe in the Windows directory
- From the command line type Junction “old dir” “new dir” and press enter
- Start lightroom and your cache is moved.
This is probably a tip only for advanced PC users and its well worth reading though the help for Junction and the Shell Shocked Article before you start, but it’s speeded up my Lightroom no end so it was worth it for me.
New: June 2009
I have just found Link Shell Extension which adds a GUI interface to the Junction Command. Very Nice and it works in x64 Vista
On Vista you can use
MKLINK [[/D] | [/H] | [/J]] Link Target
Default is a file symbolic link
/D Creates a directory symbolic link.
/H Creates a hard link instead of a symbolic link
/J Creates a Directory Junction
Link specifies the new symbolic link name
To do the same job.