catalog reintegration

[gianmaria.zanotti]

I moved a catalog from one disk to another. I am doing the reintegration. In 24 hours I am still at 41%. The catalog weighs 18 GB. Is this normal?

latest version of photo Mechanic plus

[Bob Russell]

The speed of the reintegration process depends on the drive hosting the catalog and the drive(s) with the original image files. What type of drive(s) are you using?  Are all of the drives with the images files connected?  A local SSD drive hosting the catalog will have the best performance. A networked NAS volume hosting the catalog will be the slowest. If the image files are on an external SSD with USB C, Thunderbolt 3 or 4 interface, then the performance should be close to an internal SSD drive volume.

If your drive volumes are both using a slower interface, then your reported reported reintegration time is not longer than expected for the number of images in your catalog.

Best regards,

--Bob

[gianmaria.zanotti]

The catalog’s drive is an ssd (external). The drive of the files is a usb 3…

Good night:-)

[Bob Russell]

Thank you for the updates. I will create a similar setup to see if reintegration times are better or worse than your system.

--Bob

[gianmaria.zanotti]

After 3 days I am at 76%

[gianmaria.zanotti]

 As of this morning, so for 5 hours, the progress percentage is at 91%. I will wait another 5 hours and then stop the process

[gianmaria.zanotti]

this is the third time in 2 years that I have had to rebuild the catalog from scratch for reasons beyond my control. Moving a catalog shouldn't always be such a big inconvenience. I've been stuck with the archive for 5 days and it will take me the same number of days to recreate it. something really should be done

[Bob Russell]

Thank you for the additional info.  My tests on a M2 Pro Mini using a SanDisk Extreme SSD drive for the image files, shows better intermediate results. I did a Scan to Catalog on 220k image files, which took about 2 hours to complete. The Preview size was reduced to 1024 from the default 1600 pixels.  ( This is about 5 times as fast as my previous test using an i5 Mini ).

I used the Forget Catalog option on the new catalog and then re-launched Photo Mechanic.  The Reintegrate Forgotten Catalog operation was finished in just under 10 minutes.   I will add another 250k images to this catalog and then test the reintegration process.

I am suspecting you could be done sooner by creating a new catalog on the new drive. I will post my new test results when I can.

--Bob

[Bob Russell]

It took 3 more hours to add an additional 175k images to the catalog. It now has 395k images. A reintegration was finished in just over 15 minutes.

--Bob

[gianmaria.zanotti]

I stopped the process after 5 days at 91%. now I'm putting the catalog together again, each year of photos (around 50,000) requires 5 hours of "gating" and unfortunately I had to remove the process of creating the thumbnails otherwise it would take 2 or 3 days for each year of photos.

[gianmaria.zanotti]

I'm rebuilding the archive, these are photos from a year. it will take a day to recreate it (without the thumbnails) I have 17 years of photos to recreate... :-)

[DavidHoffmanuk]

I've not done this on my current Mac but last year on my Mac Pro 5,1 with 200,000+ files I found that the speed of the rebuilding dropped as it progressed falling to around 0.3/sec by the end.
David Hoffman