Lightroom and Avast Free Anti-virus

I’ll report on this even though it doesn’t have much to do with stock photography. I struggled for months with poor performance from Adobe Lightroom Classic, which seemed to get worse, the longer I used it. I also have the Avast Free anti-virus program running on my Windows 10 PC.

I am an active user of Adobe Lightroom which maintains a large database of all the changes that you make to photographs as well as updating the image files themselves whenever a change is made. I have 104,000 images in my catalog and endless keywords in the database. I’ve noticed that whenever I move from image to image, or add titles or descriptions to my images, LR slows down for a second or two. Sync’ing metadata between two images takes at least three seconds for the window to open and populate with data ready for copying. Each time I make a change (or just move to the open program from another one on my Windows 10 machine), the Avast program takes about 15% of the CPU and after 10 seconds or so drops away. I’ve tried to exclude the folder that contains the LR database and preview files as well as the hard drive that contains the photos, but it doesn’t make a difference. I’ve tried to disabled all the core protections on Avast until the next restart but even so, the Avast program jumps into action whenever I make a change in Lightroom. In effect, nothing I have done has solved the problem.

Until today! I uninstalled Avast anti-virus and restarted my computer. Now LR behaves like a young puppy – happy and eager to take on the next task. Well, perhaps that over-states it a bit, but no more waiting for the metadata to appear on the screen – things are fast and back to normal. So if you struggle with poor performance with Lightroom Classic try moving back to the protection of Windows Defender.