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

[digikam at sritch.com]

I had the very same problem, I even considered switching to xnviewmp
which is almost as fast as photo mechanic. 

Then I discovered:

configure > views > preview > preview shows embedded ON

and NOT show the full image

and now it's quite fast. My laptop does not have a discrete video
card, so I can't use opencl and for me now DK is fast enough.

Thanks 

Syv

On Thu, 19 Dec 2024 08:32:03 +0100
Maik Qualmann <metzpinguin at gmail.com> 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  
> 
> 
> 
> 


-- 
sknahT

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