How to make thumbnails load faster / why is digiKam hidding my HDD for thumbnails?

[Thomas]

Hello,

I am following this as I experience the same. Like you, I also have 
hundreds of thousands of photos in my collection, and it is immensly 
frustrating that when opening some album it will take a very long time 
until I am able to just scroll through the album and browse the 
pictures. In fact, the problem is so severe that I have noticed that 
last few years that I am using DK less and less, and instead just 
browsing pictures using my file manager (Finder). It seems to be able to 
cache the thumbnails better.

The place where the problem is most severe is when using the People 
module. When opening some person, I should be able to see the thumbnails 
with that face instantly. But instead, it takes maybe an hour or more to 
fully load the thumbnails for a person with tens of thousand of photos. 
This makes the People module effectively unusable for me which I find 
very sad.

I have been using DK for more than a decade, and it has never been the 
snappiest user experience. But I feel like the general UI responsiveness 
issues are getting worse. I would love to report issues but I find that 
the process of reporting bugs and issues has too much frictiion. 
Additionally, DK is used to manage photo collections. These are by 
nature personal information in that they contain photos of people who 
did not consent to being part of a bug report. This makes it very 
difficult to report bugs and illustrate problems using screenshots or 
screen recordings.

I would love to be able to just show a developer my workflow and the 
issues experienced because I fear that their use case does somehow not 
hit these issues.


BR

Thomas


On 19/12/2024 07.00, Michael Moore wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've got 266,000 photos in digiKam. Photos are stored on a spinning 
> hard drive, the MySQL database is on an NVME M.2 SSD.
>
> When I change views, or when I scroll in an album the thumbnails are 
> slow to load and I hear the HDD spinning up and being accessed.
>
> I tried using Maintenance -> Rebuild Thumbnails which completed 
> successfully, but digiKam continues to hit the HDD every time. The 
> thumbnails slowly pop up one by one until they are all showing.
>
> Is there anyway to make thumbnail loading faster?
>
> Thanks,
> Michael