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

[Thomas]

So what are you saying here?

That enabling "configure > views > preview > preview shows embedded" 
will cause thumbnails to become slow?

Or that enabling "configure > views > preview > preview shows embedded" 
will fix the issue with slow thumbnails?

I seem to have embedded preview enabled, which is hinted at being 
faster. However, it is not really fast....

I was of the impression that this setting was not about thumbnails but 
rather the image shown when doubleclicking an image.

I am hesitant to switch this setting as I fear this will cause me to 
have to rebuild all my thumbnails. This will takes several days 
(probably several weeks) as I have several hundred thousand images.

This is my current setting:





On 2024-12-19 15.47, digikam at sritch.com wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
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