RAM and CPU governor for photo editing sessions

The moment a photographer opens Lightroom Classic alongside a browser, a client email, and maybe Capture One, their laptop fan spins up and everything crawls. They don't have $3,000 for a new machine — they have the machine they have, and they need their editing session to not wreck it. This is the moment they go looking for something, anything, that helps.

The gap persists because Adobe and AfterShoot have zero incentive to throttle themselves. Their engineering teams are rewarded for feature speed and render throughput, not for being polite to other processes. A leaner memory footprint actively trades against their benchmarks. Nobody inside those companies is building aggressive self-limiting behavior into their own flagship products.

What users actually need isn't a new editor — it's something that sits outside the app and enforces memory discipline on their behalf. Right now, the only real option is manually adjusting Photoshop's memory allocation slider buried four menus deep, which most users never find, and which only controls Photoshop's self-reported limit — not its actual footprint when caches and scratch disks balloon. Users report 'the program is very intensive even on a powerful machine with a light load,' meaning the problem isn't just underpowered hardware; it's that these apps grab memory aggressively regardless of what else is running.

This is a business and not a feature because the need recurs every single editing session. A photographer who edits three times a week hits this pain 150+ times a year. The alternative is either buying new hardware (which 'my old iMac can't keep up' users are already dreading) or suffering through crashes and sluggishness indefinitely. Neither of those outcomes is free.

What to build

Build a macOS and Windows background process that monitors real-time RAM and CPU allocation per editing app (Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, AfterShoot), automatically adjusts their process priority and working set limits based on what else is running, and alerts the user when a background cache has grown past a configurable threshold — without requiring the user to touch any setting inside the editing app itself.

Where to start

Start with Windows-only Lightroom Classic users, because Lightroom Classic's memory behavior on Windows is the most complained-about combination, the Windows process management APIs are more permissive, and Lightroom Classic users skew toward working photographers who edit in bulk and hit the RAM ceiling repeatedly per session.

The hard part

macOS and Windows have different APIs for process memory management, and some of what users actually want — forcing an app to release cached memory on demand — requires elevated privileges that Apple increasingly restricts, making the macOS version genuinely harder to ship and potentially fragile across OS updates.

How it makes money

One-time purchase around $25-35 with a free 14-day trial; optional annual subscription at $12/year for auto-updates and new app profiles as editing software versions change.