Life has kicked my butt. That’s what I’m thinking and feeling at the moment. I’m just home from work for the day. Kicked my shoes off. Took a shower. Ate some dinner, a cheese burger. I guess compared to a lot of people I’ve got it pretty good. And I know it’s true, but what’s the real price of this lavish existence having a roof over my head and a board of food to slake my appetite?
I’ve been struggling with my iMac the last couple days. More specifically I’ve been struggling with Adobe Lightroom classic software. It’s taken a good part of three days to get it back where it should be. At least I hope it’s back where it should be. As I write this the software is still bogged down, but I think I know why, and I think it’s temporary until it finishes syncing with the cloud. I’m not really sure why I’m syncing with the cloud. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I really never use the portable Lightroom version for pad and phone OSs. Maybe I’ll get around to doing that someday.
A couple days ago I was looking at some more marching band pix from a different event. I took upwards of 500 for this one. I was making adjustments to an image and selected an option I’d never seen before in classic Lightroom. This software is constantly being updated, upgraded, changed. You can’t stand in the way of progress, especially when it’s tech and there’s profit at stake. Anyway I selected an option called super resolution in the sharpness panel, the same panel with noise reduction. I had previously applied NR, which I’ve used a lot in the past. But then I saw the new super resolution option and thought super! So I clicked it to have a look. Lo and behold a box pops up saying it needs to configure ai something or another, and it was going to take an hour of processing. I honestly can’t remember if I canceled it immediately or let it run. This was three days ago. Either way it basically locked up my Lightroom software. It started some sort of chain reaction that devoured all of my computers memory and kept asking for more. Basically a memory leak, as I understand it.
This memory leak in my Lightroom classic was a massive pain in the ass. Every time I open Lightroom it just got hung up. It would sin its wheel and not really allow me to do anything. It took minutes to select anything. Then it seemed to not do anything when selecting an option, so I was unable to deselect super resolution. I tried several different things. Turning off and then tuning it on again time ten. I went to the adobe community for help and found a few articles that seemed relevant. It was painfully slow being able to try the suggested remedies due to the memory leak. I don’t think they helped much if at all. Then I had an epiphany.
The epiphany seemed to me was one image with one bad selection was the harbinger of my sorrow. I realized maybe I can isolate that file and remove it. Basically I had to remove the .xmp file that was its sidecar. The .xmp is what holds all the information about changes to the master file. Which is good because I don’t have to loose the master photo, just the edits. I’m glad I decided to use .xmp when I learned about it. While this whole saga cost me several hours of watching my computer restart and have its wheels spin, I didn’t lose any actual files. Once I removed the corrupted.xmp file and uninstalled and reinstalled Lightroom it seems to back in business.
My iMac is a 2017, so it’s nearly ten years old now. That’s pretty ancient for this kind of tech at this time and place in the world. My computer’s age likely played a part in causing this episode. Lightroom won’t even let me fully upgrade to the latest and greatest due to my hardware being incapable of handling the heavier load that apparently comes with the luxury of ai tools. I don’t like falling behind the tech curve like this, but I chose to be poor or at least made choices that limited any chance of not being poor. My iMac can keep up with the newer versions of software up to a point, but clearly with this episode it is struggling anyway. I hope I can keep it going another year or two before I can afford a new computer. It’s not like not having it is going to loose me money, because I don’t make any money with it, and that’s what it’s all about. Isn’t it?
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