Questions about sorting by capture time

[whistlerdan]

This is my first week using PM.  I shot an event where I used a Macbook Air to ingest the cards and do some sorting.  It was lighting quick and changing the sort order was also very very quick.  From filename to capture time on a folder of a few thousand images was just a second or so.

When I got home though i moved the images to my Drobo and fired up PM on my desktop.  By default I have set it to sort by capture time on opening a folder.  I set up a multi folder favorite for 4 folder that contained all the images from my one event.  I'm sitting here now and after 2 hours of "sorting in progress"  it has yet to open the folder.

I don't know if it has crashed , the first few times I tried this after 20 or 30 minutes I thought for sure that it must have crashed so I restarted and tried again.  This time I'm letting it run to see if it will complete the task.  My question is then why was it so quick on my Macbook ?  Does PM index the files during the ingesting process ?  Thereby making it much faster at sorting when it's using the folder where the files were originally ingested to ? 

Incidentally , i'm using a hexcore Mac  Pro with 12GB of ram running OSX Lion.  In preferences I set the caching to 1024 for both options since I read elsewhere on the forum that it is recommended.  I just can't understand why it would be taking this long?  Granted there are 17000 photos it's trying to sort, but other programs like lightroom don't seem to have this issue.

Any help, thoughts or ideas much appreciated.....

[whistlerdan]

OK I'm happy to report that it has now finished it's sorting task.  But the question still remains..... is there a better way to do this or a way to improve things ?  Now that it has sorted it, can I quit PM and then re-launch, open the same multi folder favorite and have it open instantly or is it going to want to spend several hours sorting again ?

[Kirk Baker]

OK I'm happy to report that it has now finished it's sorting task.  But the question still remains..... is there a better way to do this or a way to improve things ?  Now that it has sorted it, can I quit PM and then re-launch, open the same multi folder favorite and have it open instantly or is it going to want to spend several hours sorting again ?

Capture Time sorting is the slowest sort that PM offers (besides custom sorts which are equally slow).  PM does not currently keep a database of sort information and must parse each file for the information each time a folder is opened.  Your MacBookAir was faster because the SSD drives are so fast.

Is there a reason you have 17,000 files in a single folder?   

-Kirk

[whistlerdan]

Well it's not 17000 in one folder.  It was multiple folder, all combined into one multi folder favorite.  One event, 5 days of shooting, 5 folders.  It would be fine but it was using multiple cameras, hence my desire to sort by capture time.  I guess that's not really a viable option though as I can't wait for it to do that all the time. 

[Kirk Baker]

Well it's not 17000 in one folder.  It was multiple folder, all combined into one multi folder favorite.  One event, 5 days of shooting, 5 folders.  It would be fine but it was using multiple cameras, hence my desire to sort by capture time.  I guess that's not really a viable option though as I can't wait for it to do that all the time. 

OK, well you can always sort by Capture Time one last time and then rename the photos with the date and time in the name.  Then filename sorting will be the equivalent of a Capture Time sort but would be much faster on subsequent uses.

-Kirk

[whistlerdan]

I had thought of that, but I'm somewhat loathe to change my naming convention that I've had the same for many years.... I'll think about it.

[Luiz Muzzi]

Hi, whistlerdan
I myself have changed my method of renaming files to always contain date and time and I am pretty happy with that. Besides being able to sort files by capture time automatically, I am able to instantly perceive the date and time of the day the picture was taken just by looking at the file name. When you shoot a lot outside, it is amazing how light changes and with it the look of your photos.
Regards,

-Luiz Muzzi

[FVlcek]

Hi, something seems strange with your setup - when I open a multi-folder contact sheet with around 20 000 photos, and set it to sort by capture time, the sort takes something like 5 minutes, on a quad-core setup and Lion. The photos were on my internal drive and not external like the Drobo, but still... How is your Drobo connected?

[Kirk Baker]

Hi, something seems strange with your setup - when I open a multi-folder contact sheet with around 20 000 photos, and set it to sort by capture time, the sort takes something like 5 minutes, on a quad-core setup and Lion. The photos were on my internal drive and not external like the Drobo, but still... How is your Drobo connected?

Even if the Drobo is connected by Gigabit Ethernet with a switch, it will be an order of magnitude slower than your internal hard drive.  NAS systems are decent at large transactions, but are lousy at small random accesses which are what PM does to parse EXIF and IPTC data.  It would almost be faster to copy the file to a temp location and then use it to generate thumbnails, previews and metadata.

-Kirk