How to enable auto-loading of several next photos in Lightroom?

Question

I'm using Lightroom 4.1 to review, cherry pick and postprocess a bunch of Canon RAW photos from a big shooting session. I use the Library view in Loupe mode to review the photos and pick up the best ones. When I finish staring at one photo and optionally press B to add it to the quick collection for later processing, I press the → button to go to the next photo.

The problem is that the process of switching to the next photo is quite slow. My photos are located on a home server on the other end of a Gigabit ethernet cable, so the data transfer itself should be fast. So I suppose that most (CPU) time is spent doing something with the photo, like resizing to fit the screen, applying WB, etc.

Anyway, is it possible to tell Lightroom to preload photos in advance to speed up each switch to the next photo? So that I may leave it open for several minutes, and it would process, say, first 50 photos starting from the currently selected one.

Answer 1

The way to do this is to have Lightroom Render 1:1 previews for you. You can have it do this at import or you can force it later by selecting multiple photos in the Grid view of the Library module and choose Library > Previews > Render 1:1 Previews.

More information on optimizing Lightrooms performance can be found here.

See Also:

• How can I force Lightroom to render previews for my collection?

• Does anyone have any tips to make Lightroom run faster?