Hardware-aware settings profiles for Photoshop and Lightroom

When someone installs Photoshop or Lightroom on a laptop with 8GB of RAM and an integrated GPU, the software applies the same default settings it would on a workstation. Cache levels, GPU acceleration, scratch disk allocation, history states, preview rendering quality — none of these are tuned to the actual machine. The user just experiences it as 'slow,' which matches the complaints: 'lags when you don't have a super fancy nice computer,' 'requires a machine with high capacity,' 'optimisation of the software on some devices is not as good as it could be.'

Adobe surfaces these performance settings in a preferences panel, but they're buried, poorly documented, and require the user to understand concepts like 'cache tile size' to make good choices. Adobe has no real incentive to make this easy — their official answer is 'upgrade your hardware' or 'upgrade your plan.' The user who figures out the settings stays; the one who doesn't churns or just suffers.

The gap is a small desktop utility that reads the machine's actual specs — RAM, CPU cores, GPU type, available disk — runs a short benchmark, and then writes optimized Photoshop and Lightroom preference files directly to the correct config locations. No cloud, no subscription needed for the core product. It also monitors for performance degradation over time (scratch disk filling up, background processes stealing RAM) and nudges the user with a single recommended fix.

This is a business and not a feature because Adobe will never build it — it implicitly validates the complaint that their defaults are wrong, and it requires them to recommend turning features off. A third party has no such constraint. The recurrence is built in: every new machine purchase, every major software update that resets preferences, every time a new freelancer joins a small studio.

What to build

Build a macOS and Windows desktop utility that reads system specs, benchmarks Photoshop and Lightroom cache and GPU performance, then writes optimized preference files to the correct Adobe config directories — with a one-click 'restore defaults' rollback.

Where to start

Launch as a free one-time optimizer for Lightroom Classic specifically, because Lightroom Classic users are more likely to be serious photographers on non-workstation hardware, and the catalog and cache settings in Lightroom are particularly impactful and particularly misunderstood.

The hard part

Adobe can change the location or format of preference files in any update, so you'd be maintaining compatibility with multiple versions of multiple apps simultaneously — that's ongoing engineering overhead that never goes away.

How it makes money

Free for basic one-time optimization; $9 one-time purchase unlocks continuous monitoring, multi-app support (Photoshop + Lightroom), and per-project profile switching for users who alternate between a desktop and a laptop.