Sluggish file browser in Windows

Hi!

I’m trying to move away from Lightroom and use ART as my main raw development tool. Unlike the other existing open source raw development apps, this is the only one that gets it right. It’s simple and and easy to understand. But, I have a problem. The thumbnail browser is really sluggish and slow. I’m running ART on a Windows 10 machine with an i5 CPU @ 3.30GHz and 8GB of RAM and loading a folder full of Olympus ORF raw files on a HDD takes a good few minutes during which CPU and RAM usage remains at 100%.

Is it just me or is a common problem with Windows? I get similar results in Rawtherapee’s thumbnail browser, but I can use the darktable one relatively well.

Perhaps not helpful to you but I run ART on a very similar spec machine and the file browser is very rapid, so it is not a universal problem. I wonder what settings you have for the previews of the thumbnails?

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I’m using the default settings.

Loading a folder full of … ORF …

How “full”? I.e. how many ORFs do you have in that folder?

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10000 files approx.

Hello, I’m not on Windows, but the first time you open a photo directory, ART creates thumbnails for every photo and that can take some time. The second time you open that same dir, it should be instant because the thumbs are in cache now. If your directory contains hundreds and hundreds of photos, you’ll have to be a bit patient.

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That doesn’t seem to me realistic to have a folder containing 10000 files.
the size of folder will be about 150GB if I admit that an ORF is about 15MB.
Very risky also with backup.
You should split for instance your folder by theme, by day or whatever organization fits you.
My photos are organized in folders of a few hundred photos, generally one or two.

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Yes, I know. :sweat_smile:
This is the only folder I have with that amount of photos. The other ones contain way less images and I see that they load way faster the second time I explore them.

Thanks!

If you increase the size of your preferences window, you will see more options. One of them is the max number of cached thumbnails. Perhaps this number is just not large enough…

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Thanks! I didn’t know that!

Yes it will take quite a while to build all the thumbnails and everything will run sluggishly or might not run at all whilst doing that.
Really will make your life easier if you can have folders with less in pictures in them…

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I agree. Splitting the biggest folders makes all the difference. Thanks!

Hi,
Having a lazier loading of thumbnails is on my to-do list. Ideally, thumbs should not load until you scroll to see them. I started working on this a while ago, but there are still quite some things to do… Hopefully it will be better some day :slight_smile:

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That would be great, @agriggio!
Thanks for your work!