Author Topic: PM hanging when sorting by "Filter view by: Tagged"  (Read 3510 times)

Offline tj

  • Newcomer
  • *
  • Posts: 12
    • View Profile
PM hanging when sorting by "Filter view by: Tagged"
« on: November 17, 2014, 01:09:32 PM »
Working with folder that contains 15000 total images, only about 5000 are tagged (selected).
Was playing with preferences earlier, but have since reloaded factory preferences by following directions on this forum. Current preferences are factory defaults, but still hanging when filter sort by Tagged. I have restarted and rebooted several times. I have attached PM log file hoping it provides some answer

[attachment deleted by admin]

Offline Kirk Baker

  • Senior Software Engineer
  • Camera Bits Staff
  • Superhero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 24731
    • View Profile
    • Camera Bits, Inc.
Re: PM hanging when sorting by "Filter view by: Tagged"
« Reply #1 on: November 17, 2014, 01:17:16 PM »
Working with folder that contains 15000 total images, only about 5000 are tagged (selected).
Was playing with preferences earlier, but have since reloaded factory preferences by following directions on this forum. Current preferences are factory defaults, but still hanging when filter sort by Tagged. I have restarted and rebooted several times. I have attached PM log file hoping it provides some answer

15,000 images is a lot of images to be in one contact sheet.  That said, how long are these hangs?

-Kirk

Offline tj

  • Newcomer
  • *
  • Posts: 12
    • View Profile
Re: PM hanging when sorting by "Filter view by: Tagged"
« Reply #2 on: November 17, 2014, 01:42:43 PM »
I am also guessing too many images, but office workaround procedure is painful, slow and easy to error.
Generally hangs for 10 mins or less, but some are longer though I run out of patience and force close after 10mins.
FWIW, we have used folders with over 18,000 photos with not as much hang time. I realize we are over the recommended dosage of images, but hoping for miracle cure before applying workaround.
Gets faster the more times we bounce between "selected" and "All" or "Color", but still painfully slow the first couple times. Might be a hardware problem.
We also work with about 4-5 other programs at the same time (Pages, Google Earth, Mac Excel, etc.)
Mavericks quad, 16gb ram.

Offline tj

  • Newcomer
  • *
  • Posts: 12
    • View Profile
Re: PM hanging when sorting by "Filter view by: Tagged"
« Reply #3 on: November 17, 2014, 02:23:48 PM »
After playing around a little more, I think I mostly just overdosed on the preferences options. When reloading old preferences, it really slows to a crawl with Not Responding.
I have deleted old preferences and will rebuild with more moderate selections. Preferences is pretty extensive and hard to tell where went wrong. It is great how comprehensive it is though, especially sharing to other workers (provided system req's are same or better).
thanks.

Offline Kirk Baker

  • Senior Software Engineer
  • Camera Bits Staff
  • Superhero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 24731
    • View Profile
    • Camera Bits, Inc.
Re: PM hanging when sorting by "Filter view by: Tagged"
« Reply #4 on: November 17, 2014, 04:08:14 PM »
I want to let you know how filtering on something like a tag works in Photo Mechanic and why it would be slow on a large number of images.  The tag is part of each image's metadata that needs to be read from the file and performing this reading takes time.  PM can get the data it needs from the files on a fast local drive on the order of a hundred images per second.  If it is on a network drive, it can drop as low as tens per second.  PM generally is set to not filter on anything at all and as such it can get directly on to the business of showing you your images.  But in order to filter and only show the tagged images, PM must get the metadata for all of the images before it can filter out the non-tagged images.  If PM has already read the metadata on all of the images, then the filter will happen in mere seconds.  But if it hasn't read all of the metadata yet, then it must read it all and depending on how fast PM can access that data, the filter can take a long time.  In your case this filtering is taking minutes.

So with 15,000 images, even at 100 images read per second, it will take 150 seconds (2.5 minutes) to begin the filtering process.  If PM is only able to read the metadata on 10 images per second then it would take 25 minutes to begin the filtering process.

PM does read all of the metadata in the background while you browse your images, but if it hasn't read it all then it can take a long time to do any kind of filtering.  The Sort Cache which was introduced in PM 5 does help with this task, but the Sort Cache is of no use if the metadata hasn't been read fully at least once prior to the sorting/filtering.  If images have changed since the sort data was cached, then it must be re-read to make certain that the sort data isn't stale.  If your images don't change often, then the Sort Cache can be quite beneficial.

-Kirk
« Last Edit: November 17, 2014, 04:20:14 PM by Kirk Baker »

Offline tj

  • Newcomer
  • *
  • Posts: 12
    • View Profile
Re: PM hanging when sorting by "Filter view by: Tagged"
« Reply #5 on: November 18, 2014, 08:44:36 AM »
Thanks for explanation. Now I understand better what I have been guessing at.
I was thinking that the caching was part of my problem (clutter in the closet thinking), but now see that Sort Caching is my friend and clearing it as often as I was, is contributing to my speed problem.
Thanks for help.

Offline Kirk Baker

  • Senior Software Engineer
  • Camera Bits Staff
  • Superhero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 24731
    • View Profile
    • Camera Bits, Inc.
Re: PM hanging when sorting by "Filter view by: Tagged"
« Reply #6 on: November 18, 2014, 10:03:30 AM »
Thanks for explanation. Now I understand better what I have been guessing at.
I was thinking that the caching was part of my problem (clutter in the closet thinking), but now see that Sort Caching is my friend and clearing it as often as I was, is contributing to my speed problem.
Thanks for help.

Oh, yes, definitely don't clear the Sort Cache.  It is your friend.

-Kirk