Fun With Lightroom Slideshow!!

Hey All!

This is, by the way, a "fun" thread, a "chuckle moment", not a serious discussion, so feel free to move on, or.....

Recently I began work on a "new"/refurbished PC, not "top of the line", but better than my old workstation and the laptop that I've been stuck with. With a decent monitor, it gives a better "view", as well as better performance!

Anyway, I spent time sorting through all my cables and accessories and such and setting up both the new PC and the laptop in the space in which I'm currently "living", I got things up and running, Who Hoo!

Well, now to the "Fun Part": As part of my getting things up and running, I installed Lightroom on the new box. I had an external drive that I hooked up that has my LR Library, not just the catalog but also my 50,000-image collection, pics going back to old scanned film stuff and then 15 years of digital stuff, like I said, 50k photos. So, they got up painlessly in Lightroom!

Well, then! First I'll note that I don't have a new/CC version of LR: I have LR 4.x -- it's served me well, but there are some features I'm missing, of course...

Anyway, as part of the process of getting things up and running, to give me some entertainment, I decided that I would run a Lightroom Slideshow on my photo library! That way, I could be twiddling around my "space" doing whatever, and glance over and check out whatever photo was being shown!

Now, I'll say that I have used the slideshow features not just of Lightroom, but also of the Windows Photo Viewer and also of my PBase gallery, they all work. But the reason I chose LR is because I can, in the Library, choose "All Photos", they fill the filmstrip, and I can do a slideshow of all those dang 50k photos, not just ones in a particular folder, and LR will show Raw renditions, not just jpegs like the others!

Well, it was good, I selected "All Photographs", and chose to Start the slideshow, and...

It started by doing a "Slideshow Preview" of all my photos, in other words it began going through all 50k photos making previews! Wow, evidently each preview took about 1 second for an older jpeg to render (I didn't check Raws), so I watched and waited, eventually moving on to other things as the process kept going!

I haven't bothered to "calculate" things, 50k seconds translated to hours (what is it, a bit under 14 hours?), but Wow, the whole thing took a long time to complete!

Anyway, at least I can entertain myself a bit!!!

Tony I have for many years used the Impromptu Slideshow option, the triangle icon at the bottom of the library window as a manually started "screen saver" when I wanted to hide the desktop. In LR4.x when you see the creating previews dialogue if you click the skip button it allows the slideshow to start, and it generates the previews as it goes. This can slow down transitions, especially on a slow computer, but I never found it to be an issue. It's not like you are using it for a professional presentation after all. Disappointingly on the latest CC version, which I needed to upgrade to for 5K display support, they seem to have removed the skip option, which is really disappointing, because as you say if you have 10K images it is going to take two and three quarter hours to render them, at one per second. Having to wait for a two or three hours for an impromptu slideshow to start running is a bit lame. Once you have the previews generated it still shows that same dialogue, it just runs though really quick as it checks they are present.

Alan