Thumbnail Generation: Need Advice!

[modean987]

Lovin' Photo Mechanic, but it's driving me nuts with it's incessant slow generation of thumbnails, and I would like some advice on how to improve the generation speed.

I use an M1 MBP w/16GB RAM.

I include TIFF and PS files in my catalog. They're big -- 300MB to 2GB. They're on a network drive. I use a CAT6 cable to access the drive. I usually view a folder of 500 to 1500 files.

PM has to generate thumbnails for the folder EVERY time I access it. Does it not store/cache the thumbnails? If so, why does it regenerate them all the time? And if I use a collection, it as to regenerate the thumbnails for that collection, even if I just generated them 5 minutes ago for the same files included in another collection.

Speaking of collections... I can do nothing with them until PM is done gathering the metadata information for every file in the collection. If I try to do something, like arrange the thumbnails, it gives an error saying it was unable to complete the request, and it will do this until I slowly scroll through the collection until each thumbnail is generated, at which point it will happily do whatever I tell it (don't tempt me!).

I must be doing something wrong. Advice please? Oh yeah, I am not generating high quality thumbnails, nor sharpening them.

Thanks in advance.

[ahoward]

Does it not store/cache the thumbnails? If so, why does it regenerate them all the time?

It certainly does cache thumbnails. There are two preference pages giving the user lots of control over how the various caches work. Unfortunately, caches are not infinite. As new things come, old things go out. When a TIFFs and PSDs are rendered, a rendered JPEG is saved to the Render Cache, which, by default, maxes out at 8GB. When they are loaded onto a Contact Sheet, if there is a cached version available in the Render Cache, a thumbnail is loaded into the Disk Cache, and then into memory. You can adjust the sizes of all of these caches, you may find some larger cache sizes to be beneficial (at the expense, of course, of disk space). If you view the same item twice, but there is enough activity between those viewings that it has left the cache, then it needs to read the file from the source again (or one of the higher level, slower caches).

They're on a network drive. I use a CAT6 cable to access the drive.

Please see Kirk's reply here: https://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=11431.msg55817#msg55817

And if I use a collection, it as to regenerate the thumbnails for that collection, even if I just generated them 5 minutes ago for the same files included in another collection.

How recently the thumbnails/previews were generated is not as critical as how much other data was accessed/cached since it was generated.

Speaking of collections... I can do nothing with them until PM is done gathering the metadata information for every file in the collection. If I try to do something, like arrange the thumbnails, it gives an error saying it was unable to complete the request, and it will do this until I slowly scroll through the collection until each thumbnail is generated, at which point it will happily do whatever I tell it (don't tempt me!).

I must be doing something wrong. Advice please?

You're browsing massive files on a drive that will have slower access times than most other types of drives you could connect to your computer. I doubt you're doing anything "wrong" (unless you put your the catalog database on the NAS in addition to the actual photos: that would terrible for performance) but its not going to have great performance. That said, I believe the specific issue of sometimes getting stuck on the "Gathering Metadata" step is something Kirk has looked into but hasn't been able to find a solution for.

[modean987]

Thanks for the response, ahoward!

Yes, I know putting the files on a network drive is going to take a performance hit, but I don't have the storage space on my local drive to hold them, and a USB drive is not going to be much faster than a CAT6 connection, I don't think. FWIW, the database is on my local drive.

I've played around with the cache settings, and like the hints there say, bigger is not necessarily better. One thing that did help, quite a bit, actually, is the Memory Cache size. I've upped it to 24% (of 16GB). I don't think it prudent to take it any higher than that, and I need to be careful with how many contact sheets and other programs I have open.

The Gathering Metadata dialogue is a mystery. Increasing the Memory Cache helped in that regard, but it'll act up seemingly out of nowhere at times. I haven't been able to nail down what the cause of it might be.

I'll keep tinkering and analyzing the results.

Thanks, again!