How Much Memory (RAM) Does Lightroom Need?

For most photographers 16GB of memory will allow Lightroom Classic CC to run really well, though photographers doing a lot of work using both Lightroom and Photoshop at the same time you will benefit from having 32GB of memory.

Price to Lightroom Performance With Memory

As a photographer you are probably visiting this page because you want to know how much money you should spend on memory for a computer to run Lightroom well. As a hobbyist photographer who has to as much out of his dollar as he possibly can I am all about how to get the best bank for my buck so you are at the right spot.

8GB Of Memory To Run Lightroom – Just Enough

It is entirely possible to have a computer run Lightroom well with 8GB of memory in your computer. However, you are likely going to find that with 8GB of memory in your computer you will have a hard time running Lightroom, Photoshop, and a browser with a number of tabs open all at the same time.

If budget is super tight and you just can’t pay for the upgrade to 16GB of memory then go with 8GB and make sure you close down everything else besides Lightroom and Photoshop while you are editing your photos. You should even close down Photoshop if you aren’t using it to give Lightroom as much of those 8GB of memory as you possible can and things should go pretty well.

16GB Of Memory to Run Lightroom – Best Price to Performance

16GB is really the sweet spot right now to run Lightroom well for most photographers. At least as far as price to performance goes. The cost to go to 8GB of memory to 16GB is fairly reasonable and the performance benefits to Lightroom are really worth the additional cost worth it.

Lightroom really wants more than 8GB of memory while you process photos. Starting up Lightroom the program immediately takes 1.5GB of memory. Scroll through 20 or so raw photos in the Develop module for a minute and Lightroom memory usage jumps up to 3.5GB of memory. Change a few sliders on several raw images and it goes up to 4GB of memory. Generate 1:1 and smart previews on 20 megapixel raw files and Lightroom uses about 7GB of memory, getting dangerously close to those 8GB and not leaving much room for macOS/Windows 10 in addition to other programs (like web browsers).

I did some further testing to see what functions in Lightroom Classic 8.3.1 utilized memory. I couldn’t get Lightroom to consume more than about 7GB of memory doing “normal” tasks every photographer is going to do on a regular basis like import photos, rate them, edit them using sliders/brushes/filters, and exporting to JPEG. For most photographers doing the routine tasks in Lightroom, 16GB is enough memory to have it perform really well and leaves enough room to run other programs at the same time like Photoshop and a browser.

However, when I threw an panorama merge of 13 raw frames at it while it was building 1:1 and Smart Previews for 533 raw photos in the background the memory utilization jumped up to 20GB while doing the merge and settled in at about 16GB after the merge was done. This was on a Windows 10 computer that had 32GB of memory so Lightroom could stretch out and pretend like it owned the place by using as much memory as it wanted to.

32GB Of Memory to Run Lightroom – Extreme Editing Choice

If you are a more experienced post processor and know that you are going to do panorama and/or HDR merges in Lightroom or you know you are going to be round tripping between Lightroom and Photoshop on a regular basis working with lots of layers in Photoshop, 16GB of memory won’t be enough.

16GB of memory will still work, it just means you will run out of memory and the computer will have to go to the much slower hard drive in your computer to get some temporary relief when it runs out and everything slows down while that is going on.

If you are a photographer who is going to be doing a little bit more extreme editing of your photos then you want to go with 32GB of memory. I use a Windows 10 PC for most of my editing. It is a computer I custom built myself in 2014 that has 32GB of memory and while I have worked on sports composites I have had Photoshop give me error messages that I couldn’t use the select and mask workspace because there wasn’t enough memory available.

Those are extreme cases, and I think the issue had to do with some of the features in Photoshop having a problem called a memory leak where it didn’t manage the memory properly. So I am not recommending that photographers upgrade further from 32GB of memory to 64GB of memory unless you can afford it without any problem and you know you are going to be working on gigapixel images or other extreme photo processing.

Save Money on Memory

While you are here, if you pay to have the manufacturer of your computer upgrade the memory for you they charge a premium for that. Especially Apple, who charges on a nearly exponential scale to upgrade the memory in their Macs. For some Macs you don’t have a choice, like the 2019 MacBook Pro and the 2019 21″ iMac. However the 2018 Mac Mini, the 27″ iMac, and nearly all PCs allow you to upgrade the memory yourself through a very simple process and save quite a lot of money.

Check out my Photographer’s Guide to Buying a Mac Mini and Photographer’s Guide to Buying an iMac for more information on that and other configuration options.