That's an amazing memory you have. Wish I had that.
I wish I did too. I went to your account and looked at your recent posts.
Here's a recap:
It takes a full minute or so for PM to pull up the Navigator view. And when the Nav window is left open, things can really hang up. I've tried to get my team to stop using the Navigator window but they need to be able to open certain subfolders together in one tab and right now, this can only be done in the Navigator view. Granted, we have 6 'connected' drives and maybe 5 large "disconnected" drives (we do this to trick lightroom into thinking they are local) and when one of them is expanded, there might be 50-75 project folders on that drive.
A couple of thoughts that might help...
1. If we could use your "Open Folders and Subfolders in New Contact Sheet" or "Open in Current Contact Sheet" directly in the context sensitive System Explorer Menu or in the PM File>Open Contact Sheet... menu - we wouldn't even need to use the Navigator window at all. This would be by far the best solution for us as it would give us flexibility to use PM directly from the System Explorer.
2. Allow users to determine when the Navigator refreshes itself. At least then, we would only be stuck waiting the first time it opens.
3. If there's a way to make it scan faster....
I've attached a pic of our file system hierarchy just fyi...
We REALLY appreciate your help on this. We easily lose a good 2 full man-hours a week in our office on these PM hangups. If there is anything I can do to help, just let me know. Thanks.
Is there some reason you don't use the Favorites? You can put the folders that you care about into it and it can also open folders and subfolders. When you've moved on to a different project, you can just remove the unwanted items.
One note about your image though: you appear to have a large number of folders at the root of your drives. I see that you're already naming them with the year as the prefix. Why not put them into yearly folders? That alone should help a lot.
That said, I do like the idea of making the PM Shell Menu offer to open folders and subfolders directly, but I'll have to look into whether that can be accomplished or not.
And one other question - if we have fully loaded desktop machines and go to open a folder containing say 4,000 RAW photographs for culling purposes what would be the best setup of PM Preferences in that situation to build thumbs as quickly as possible? It seems that PM stops building thumbs if we move to another application so we can spend a great deal of time just waiting for the scan before we can change the sort (which we might need to do different ways each time).
The thing that makes the most difference is fast read access to your images. Locally stored images load much faster than ones on network drives. Settings-wise, I suggest setting the Memory cache to 512MB (I do not recommend making it any higher though.) PM should load thumbnails in the background, but it may not be able to keep them all in memory (depending on your settings: thumbnail size, memory cache size, total number of items in the contact sheet) and may need to page the disk-cached thumbnails back into memory.
-Kirk
