If Lightroom seems to be working slowly, you can improve the speed with some simple steps:

1. The first thing to try is to restart Lightroom. This step refreshes the memory, like giving the application a clean slate. It does not delete any work you have done in Lightroom!

2. The amount of available RAM is important (the minim of 2GB really is not enough). If you have other applications open when working in Lightroom, try closing these down.

3. If you use Lightroom with Photoshop, make sure you check the RAM allocated to Photoshop in the Photoshop Preferences. You may be using most of your computer's RAM on Photoshop and not leaving enough for Lightroom to work efficiently. 

4. If Lightroom seems to have slowed down when you edit your images, try increasing the Camera Raw cache. This should help the performance in the Develop module. With Lightroom open, on a Mac, select Lightroom > Preferences >File Handling. On a PC select Edit > Preferences > File Handling. Now increase the Camera Raw Cache number which is set at 1 GB in the defaults. Try 3 GB to start. Depending on the available space on the hard drive where the cache is stored, you can increase this number even more. 

These are just the first four steps to try. There are others and we will write about those later.