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

[Thomas]

Hi Maik,

Thanks for your response. I am relieved to see that you are actually 
aware of the problem and working on it.

Note: I do not use MySQL in my setup. I use SQLite on a local, very 
fast, NVMe SSD.

Regarding the faces thumbnails generated on the fly - are these simply 
not stored in the database? Would it be possible to change that? When 
you have tens of thousands of photos on a person, it will always take a 
very long time to generate these, so I really think they should be 
cached somewhere...


BR

Thomas



On 2024-12-19 08.32, Maik Qualmann wrote:
> 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
>
>
>