How I sped up Luminar V4.1.0(5191) on Windows 10 64 bit

Since we have no control over how efficiently or not Luminar 4 is written, the only way that users can influence its response time is hardware. Here is my experience trying to speed up the software. 

For various reasons I was never happy with how my HP laptop (CPU: Intel i7-8550U @ 1.8GHz) came configured.  Eventually, I decided to reformat the C: drive and reinstall all of my software from scratch.  Well, if I was going to do that, I figured that I’d replace my full M.2 C: drive with a larger one (It was full, but I later figured out that it was full of bloatware and not real programs).  Once I opened up the case I decided to also replace the 1TB HDD D: with an SSD and move my photos internally from an external HDD. This “mission creep” is a pattern you will see me repeat. 

First, I replaced the M.2 C: with a 4TB drive and the HDD D: with a 4TB SSD. While I had the case open, I decided that I may as well upgrade from 16GB of RAM to 32GB too. As I was reinstalling the software and data files, I also decided to break up my Luminar photo catalog by year.

Results: Luminar now runs reasonably well; it’s not instantaneous, but acceptable. If the next update improves speed as much as the last one, I’ll be happy. Also, the software is much more stable; in fact it has only crashed once since I reloaded Luminar nine days ago. Aurora is pretty zippy now, too.

Of all of the improvements, I think the additional RAM did the most to speed up the software. Luminar now loads in 12 seconds.  Breaking up my photo catalog by years also helped. These two changes weren’t too expensive ($100 for the RAM and breaking up my catalog was free) and probably are the bulk of the improvement.  Next I think, was the faster C: drive to speed loading the program.  Moving the latest two years onto an internal SSD also helped, but even on the catalog of older photos that I kept on the external drive I see a significant improvement.

That was my experience: $100 of RAM and breaking the catalog into smaller pieces gave big improvements, while faster internal SSDs sped things up but didn’t give as big of a bang for the buck.  Good luck.