I must have ‘googled’ that title, with variations, more than 20 times over the weekend.

What was the problem?

Well, every time I export (equivalent to ‘Save As’ on Microsoft lingo) a file, Lightroom will suddenly just stop working and I have to CTRL-ALT-DEL and re-start it . I was not having this problem before and was able to export files, irregardless I’m working on a .CR2, a .DNG or a .JPG files…colored or black & white. It took me, well, 2 days to sort it out and come out with the solution…by accident. And the crash that I thought, well it actually was not a crash and the software actually didn’t hang .

Below is a snapshot of my User Preset for exporting file, named For Email and where I limit the file size to 200K.

Everything has been ok until I started to do more post processing and played around with the Spot Removal and Adjustment Brush tools at Lightroom! Great tools by the way.

First sign, the program started to become draggy every time I load the file where I’ve done some extensive post processing especially with the Adjustment Brush tool. I suspect it might have something to be with my processor and my installed memory.

This is my machine and more than meets up the Lightroom system requirements.

So I ruled this one out but just to be sure, I did some monitoring using Process Lasso. I noticed some spikes when I run Lightroom but my machine is basically handling it.

So what could be wrong?

Well, that’s basically where the problem lies. Lightroom was not able to tell me what was the problem, no message, no alert …nothing. Again, that is what I thought. There was actually this message below.

Due to some extra post processing applied to the photo, file size becomes bigger. That is understandable. But this message did not show up on the main monitor that I was working on but on the secondary display, my LCD TV which was not turned ON during that time. I get to find it out only when I turned ON the TV because I was damned pissed off and couldn’t export the file that I need to deliver to a client, that would’ve pay me a million bucks, and decided to watch a Simpson’s re-run instead (well I wish that was the scenario… ).

The solution? I changed the Limit File Size to more than 200K (I’m using 300K at the moment). That’s all.

I’m still new with Lightroom so I might still encounter some problems along the way. This is quite trivial actually but it is such a pain especially when you don’t know what is going on. My point is, since Lightroom 4 is in the pipeline, Adobe can take note to ensure that whatever pop-up alerts/messages be displayed at the main monitor only*, irregardless of using a secondary display or not.

Hope this helps.

* - or there could already be some setting to enable this that I do not know of yet.