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

[Maik Qualmann]

In fact, it was possible that with digiKam-8.x.0 thumbnails were repeatedly 
created or the items were scanned again when using MySQL. With digiKam-8.5.0 
this should now only happen once, after which the thumbnail from the DB should 
always be used.
The problem with the face thumbnail is known, as we currently only create 
these "on the fly". But these also have to be loaded quickly the second time. 
Note that MySQL is not really fast as a storage medium, everything has to be 
transported over a network. But here with a local MySQL database, albums with 
thousands of images are loaded without delay.

Maik

Am Donnerstag, 19. Dezember 2024, 08:09:08 Mitteleuropäische Normalzeit 
schrieb 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