Thumbnail browsing (Grid View)

[hedehodo]

Hi All,

I have just installed Lightroom Beta2 (MacOS 1'.5.4) and added ~1'K pictures. I am trying to get used to Lightroom, but thumbnail browsing delays are really a turn-off.

In grid mode (or using the slider at the bottom), whenever you scroll to a different set (scroll down on grid, or right on slider), Lightroom shows a bunch of pixelated thumbnails first, then renders them and they become clear. This is really pretty annoying, andit takes about 3 seconds for each page scroll. Furthermore, if you look at CPU usage at this point, it spikes upto ~6'%.

What I don't understand is, even simple/basic programs (e.g. iPhoto) and software like Extensis can render thumbnails really fast (you don't even see this).

What is wrong with Lightroom? Without proper/fast browsing of thumbnails, how are you supposed to organize your pictures?

BTW, I tried rendering 1:1 and Standard previews, regenerating previews from scratch (e.g. exit LR, remove previews, start LR and wait), but no luck!

Am I missing something? Am I the only one having this issue? Any fix?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Gene McCullagh]

Yes. It is a bit annoying. However, I've noticed that the delay seems to be only on the first scroll through. The next time I scroll to a set of thumbnails that has already gone through this "rendering" routine it's pretty much instantaneous. It's still there but hardly noticeable.

Unfortunately, when you close the catalog and open it later you're back to square one and the render delay remains until you've already visited that set of thumbnails.

I think what's going one (and this is certainly something Adobe should address as the version numbers increase) is that the thumbnail view (as with most of the views) presents the original image first and then renders and database adjustments to present the "real" preview. The larger the catalog, the longer it takes.

 

[hedehodo]

It really is a painful experience to wait 2-3 seconds after every (page) scroll all the time... And, I don't think I can use LR like this, i.e. wait 2-3 seconds between every page when you have 2K images from a trip is not acceptable.

As you said, it does not look like it is caching thumbnails (which is something I can't understand why!) at all. Given that people process pictures [usually] once, and from that point on use this software for archiving, I can't understand why LR is not caching these!...

Is there anyway you can pre-generate these thumbnails and/or cache them? Or any tips/tricks to get around this problem?

Thanks.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

I do agree, it's frustrating. Hopefully the final release will be a bit better on this.

It does cache the thumbnails... except there are so many different sizes of thumbnails available, it still has to resize on the fly. I'd hope this is the one area that will really improve in future.

 

[Gene McCullagh]

I agree. Adobe needs to address the re-rendering issue.

You might try a Relaunch and Optimize on your catalog. This can sometimes speed things up and may have some impact on the thumbnail rendering.

 

[hedehodo]

Thanks for all the responses...

Is it not possible to cache thumbnails for a given/specified and/or pre-defined size? Like generating 1:1 and smaller previews? This would definitely make things way faster and I think that this is a reasonable functionality/feature comprise...

As we all agree, it is pretty bad to wait that long instead of having some sort of a cache.

BTW, as I mentioned, I just downloaded the beta, and hence just created this catalog. So, it has not been used for a while, and not sure how much Relaunch/Optimize can help, though I will try it.

 

[DonRicklin]

Did you originally have Standard Previews built for the files. You can always do them again. I recently had to redo all my previews after a Catalog problem which was repaired. it took hours on 18K images that had been off-line.

Once done they were all fine, even when off-line again.

Don

 

[hedehodo]

Did you originally have Standard Previews built for the files. You an always do them again. I recently had to redo all my previews after a Catalog problem which was repaired. it took hours on 18K images that had been off-line.

Once done they were all fine, even when off-line again.

Don

Thanks for the suggestion. But I had both 1:1 and Standard size previews built already, which like yours took hours...

Furthermore, as I said before, the fact that CPU usage is spiking with every scroll down...

 

[Mark Sirota]

Sounds like not enough available memory on the system to me -- it doesn't have enough cache available for this. Are you running any other memory-hungry programs at the same time, and is the machine loaded up with RAM?

 

[jimburgess]

I don't think the amount of RAM affects the issue. I have an 8 core Mac Pro with 12GB of RAM, and I see the problem. It takes about 1/2 second to render a page of thumbnails as I scroll down through a folder. And I see it "re-render" when scrolling back up, but less frequently of course. Yes, previews exist.

And yes, it is very annoying when quickly browsing a folder of images while looking for specific photos. I truly believe LR has a design and/or implementation issue regarding rendering of thumbnails.

 

[hedehodo]

I have 2GB of memory on the system, and nothing was running at the time (closed everything to test this). Memory cache might be definitely useful. But as jimburgess mentioned, I also think there is a design/implementation issue here:

- If you have 9K images and each thumbnail is say 5'K, it requires 45' Megs for the whole thing (light room probably won't be caching everything), but even total cache size is not much.

- Every time you restart the software, you will loose your memory cache, hence you will experience the same exact thing.

- Even software that is much simpler (extensis, irfanview on windows, etc) can do instant rendering for thumbnails.

Given that the whole point of having thumbnails is to have a quick look, there is no point in having thumbnails if you need to wait for them like this. In fact, I can switch between previews much faster than thumbnails on lightroom.