[Digikam-users] Out of curiosity: digiKam is a very fast viewer for RAWs. How?

[Gilles Caulier]

2008/5/11 Marcel Wiesweg <marcel.wiesweg at gmx.de>:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I like it a lot, that a user can scroll in-between the views of his
>> RAWs in digiKam very fast.
>>
>> Out of curiosity and because I couldn't find infos in the handbook
>> about that feature:
>> How did you realized such a fast viewing for such big files?
>> Just the concept, technical details are not important.
>
> Short answer: Don't load the big file, load the small file.
> Most RAW files have an embedded preview which is already generated by the
> camera when creating the file. The camera has obviously the same problem with
> displaying big files on its display as we have. If such a preview is
> available, we use it in the preview mode (you can opt to always view the full
> size image in the setup).
> If no preview is available, we will use the fastest method for decoding a RAW
> file available from dcraw, but in this case, loading is slow.
>

And another point. loading of preview is done using a separate thread
(multithreading)

If you have a double core computer, it faster. A dedicated CPU will be
used to do the job.

Gilles ( who is back from LGM2008 - Poland)