Very slow performance
On1 is really letting me down right now. Especially since the update. It now takes 4 seconds to fully load each image to check sharpness. This is happening even when I go back to an image that previously loaded. The way it’s promoted is the image will load instantly once it’s been clicked on once. When culling through images to eliminate duplicates and pick the sharper images On1 is painstakingly slow. Then exporting is even worse! It took 4 minutes and 3 secs to export 9 jpgs. Then it took 13 minutes and 12 seconds to export 31 images. With my workflow being that slow I had to do something else. I downloaded a 7 day trial of LR. It exported those same 9 images in 40 seconds and the 31 images in 2 minutes and 32 seconds! The tools in On1 are superior and editing photos more powerful in On1 and it’s why I switched several months back. But I simply can’t continue if this performance isn’t fixed. Can someone please provide some guidance? I’ve tried to adjust all the new gpu settings. Nothing helped.
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The .On1 files are not scratch files. Those, along with the XMP files are called Sidecars. The .on1 files contain a backup of your edits (The Photo Raw database also has a copy). If you copy, move or backup any of your photos, you need to keep the sidecars with them if you don't want to lose your work.
Sidecar options are on page 206 of the user guide.
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Bonjour
Je constate que je ne suis pas le seul à avoir des soucis de lenteur avec PR. C'est bien dommage car je trouve ce logiciel génial en remplacement de Lightroom mais beaucoup trop lent. J'ai une machine qui date de l'an dernier. Un model correct je pense un Ryzen 5 2600x, 16 Go de ram, disque systeme SSD, les photos sont sur un disque normal 7200 trs, et une carte graphique GTX1660 Super.
Il parait que PR utilise le GPU, il n'en est rien sur mon pc. Je monte même pas à 5% d'usage.
Du coup c'est très désagréable à utiliser PR. J'édite presque à chercher une alternative même si les outils sont très intéressant.
Si vous avez une idée pour l'usage du GPU je suis preneur.
Merci
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I have read this thread with interest and have a similar experience to Robert Johnson.
After having a good, but minimal, experience with ON1-PR 2019, I upgraded to ON1-PR 2020. I'm running an i7 computer with 32 GB of RAM. Nothing in the way of a graphics card or an SSD drive for work areas.
I loaded up 9 photos a day or two ago, actually 3 unique photos at 3 exposure levels, to check for clipping. Moving from photo to photo was taking 10 seconds or more at a time. I turned off the cataloguing entirely and that helped a little.
I'm not adverse to spending some money to get a new graphics card and the SSD drive.
But I don't believe they will help. The files are 7-8 megabyte CR2 files (Canon raw), not very big. The delay is in moving from photo to photo, not in the screen draw.
I don't want to improve my machine and then find out I've optimized parts of the program that aren't problematic, and as I mention, I had no performance issues with PR 2019.
I noted that someone above solved the issue by reverting to PR 2020.1. That shouldn't be the case and points to a problem in 2020.5.
I have 27,000 photos in the library, mostly CR2 and JPG files. Removing the catalog helped but didn't solve the issue.
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Henry, I have to say that I think getting a discrete graphics card will help your performance.
I have a Canon camera and the CR2 files are around 40mb and On1 2020.5 runs extremely well on my PC. My system specs listed below
CPU: Intel I5-9600K CPU @ 3.7 GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z390 AORUS PRO WiFi
(Intel LGA1151/Z390/ATX/2xM.2 Gaming Motherboard)RAM: 32 GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 RAM
3000MHz running at 3066MhzGPU: GeForce RTX 2060 - 6GB RAM
OS: Windows 10 Home edition 64 bit Ver 2004 Build 19041.450
Drive Configuration:
OS and On1 on Primary internal Nvme drive
ON1 Scratch and browse folders on 2nd internal SSD
Photos stored and edited on 3rd internal SSD0 -
I turned off the cataloguing entirely and that helped a little. Had the catalog building process finished running? While the Catalogs are being built your system will run slow as the program is dedicating much of its resources to doing all the rendering of the previews and building the catalog databases including keywords, etc. Once that process has finished your system's performance will improve.
I don't believe they will help. There are multiple threads on these forums where the addition of a dedicated SSD is discussed. Reread my response to Robert above where I use the analogy of driving a Lamborghini across a busy bridge.
I guarantee that by adding a dedicated SSD you will see an improvement in performance.
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I agree with David, a good graphics card is also essential.
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I'm going to add the SSD drive and a graphics card. My worry is that you can't fix a software problem with hardware, not really. I'm a business application software developer. I see all kinds of strange things happen in the field with large databases and sometimes it's just a matter of fixing an index to get a 100x speed improvement. Quite a different kind of software though.
David, I'm wondering if you think I should go all the way to a $500+ card like you have, or stick with the lower end like a 1050 which prices out around $200 here in Canada.
If this doesn't solve the issue then I guess it's back to Lightroom. I hate to do that because I think the UI improvements in 2020.5 are quite incredible. I'm planning to scan about 7000 slides and have invested a great deal of intellectual capital in determining how to do this quickly, with reasonable fidelity. ON1 PR has quite a number of features I'll be taking advantage of to accomplish this task.
In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.
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Henry, I think the 1050 might be OK but I would try to get one with 6GB memory. On1 recommends 2 GB dedicated video RAM but that page is a year old and I personally think that is too low to get good performance.
Just for reference for you, I just opened a folder in On1 and went to Edit in film strip mode. It takes about 3 seconds for one of my 40MB files to fully load when switching from one to the next in the filmstrip. Leaving the session open and going back through the same files second and third time etc they load almost instantly.
Note - I have the files I'm editing are stored on a SSD drive and my scratch and browse folder are on a separate small SSD drive.
On another note, I see you mention scanning slides. When you do that if they happen to be back and white make sure you do not scan them in a greyscale color space. On1 needs them to be in RGB.
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Thanks, David. I've done a bit of research on the video cards, and right now I'm leaning to the Radeon RX 580 which is a mid-priced card. I think all these cards handle OpenGL and it's reasonable to infer that ON1 Photodraw will output in OpenGl to render more quickly.
The Open CL platform, which has nothing to do with the similar sounding OpenGL, holds great promise. Somewhere in a press release, ON1 makes reference to using Open CL. I don't know the extent to which Open CL is utilized, but if they don't use it greatly now, they may in the future.
Fair bit of guesswork in making the decision but I don't want to spend more time on it. Unless I receive indications otherwise I'll give the Radeon a try for now. I'll maximize the memory. Might as well, the memory is cheap compared to the card.
My slides are all colour, but thanks for the advice. I'm also using a lens attachment with a macro lens to get the entire library in. This is actually working quite well. I have a Nikon slide scanner to use on individual photo's that I might print at a later date, but for now the goal is to get a digital reference library quickly, at some slight sacrifice to fidelity.
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Hi Brian
Some advice would be welcomed..
In my case, the May Windows 10 update arrived rather late on my laptop in August. My laptop has only a HDD, and the Windows 10 update is 'killing it' all on it's own. (The HDD is at 100% for large parts of the day, where as it was not before the update). The effect on everything that is running on my laptop, has to be seen to be believed. (Even Word and Outlook are stuttering). The effect on PR 2020 is also bad. In short I will now have to fit an SSD, just to cope with the May Windows 10 update.
I have discovered that I can fit a SATA-M drive SSD, (there is a spare slot on the motherboard), and.. when I get a work break I will be adding one.
-I understand your comment about the benefits of having two separate SSDs, but if I put the cache on the same drive as the programmes, just how big a difference would it make in terms of speed?
-If necessary, I could also replace the current HDD with an internal SSD, and my youngest added an SSD to his, by replacing the DVD drive with an SSD Caddy. Which, in his case has worked really well, and it also did tame the bad effects from the May update.
A few years ago, I added a flash drive, which is now my Z-drive/scratch drive for PR. Watching Task Manager, PR does use the Z-drive, when I am working on larger images. It probably is not as fast as an SSD, but it is faster than the HDD.
Task Manager also shows that the integrated graphics are used, but only for certain parts of PR. i.e. when I am in edit/effects, there is likely to be activity in the graphics department. But, when using resize, and export, all of the activity seems to be in the CPU. And, when starting or shutting down PR, the HDD goes to 100%.
Thanking you in advance, and I will let you know how the SSD upgrade goes.
Best wishes
David Price
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Henry, The 580 looks to be a good choice as long as you maximize memory as you say.
When you get the card please be sure to configure Windows and your settings to take advantage of the card.
In Windows Graphic Settings setup On1 as below to prefer high performance.
For card specific setup see this link for driver configuration advice from On1. I'm not familiar with AMD cards so can't give any more advice other than give you this link.
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Hi David Price,
I'm not sure what you mean by, "The HDD is at 100% for large parts of the day…". Does this mean I/O activity or is the drive full at 100% capacity? If it is I/O activity you'll have to figure out what is doing all the I/O. If the drive is full you'll definitely see a performance impact all across the board. Not just ON1 but everything will suffer when a drive has less than ~10% free space left. You might consider removing older restore points if the drive is full. If you haven't needed to restore to an update 2 or 3 generations old you don't need to keep it around any more IMO. I have to occasionally clean my boot drive of older snapshots, especially right after an OS update. I've got an alarm set whenever the drive's free space drops below 15% capacity.
[I]f I put the cache on the same drive as the programmes, just how big a difference would it make in terms of speed? I have not made any measurements, I just don't do it. Programs have to load different pieces from disk as you move from one part of the program to another so that is just more I/O load to be shared on the device that is most sensitive to ON1's performance.
I realize I'm spending your money (that you might not have 😉) but I would get 2 SSDs. I would transfer the current HDD to one of the new SSDs, maybe one larger than your current HDD to leave some room for future growth. Once that is up and running you'll see an improvement in overall system performance, especially in boot times and program load times. When you're comfortable that all is working well then add the 2nd SSD and move ON1's Scratch & PerfectBrowseCache to it. This will also free up space on your boot drive to give you some more breathing room. The old HDD can then be placed in an external enclosure and used for a backup drive.
If you can't afford 2 new drives do the Scratch & PBC thing first. Again, it will free up space on the boot drive and speed ON1's performance.
Also, yes, flash drives are generally slower than SSDs. Still better than a spinning HDD. 😁
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David,
A Windows 10 update should not do that to your machine. I suspect something is competing with your programs on your hard drive. Usually the culprit is anti-virus, either Windows or sometimes a stealth install of McAfee or the like. I would check the Add/ Remove programs area ( now called 'Apps') for McAfee or search for virus.
It's possible the MS virus protection is playing catch up on the entire hard drive with your upgrade. The way to find out is to turn the virus off completely for an hour, disable network card so you're not on the Internet and work and see if the issue goes away. If it does, turn virus back on and diagnose further. At least you know what it is.
Also, keep Task Manager open, sort on the Disk column in the Performances tab, and see what's taking up the Disk I/O when your machine slows down.
The other thing that can kill I/O is if something happened to your swap file. I haven't diagnosed a swap file problem in some years, but it's another area that you can research.
Ordinary stuff like Word, et cetera, should not require an SSD under any circumstances.
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Hi Brian,
Yes you may be about to spend money that I don't really have :-)
To answer another person's question. I've just restarted the laptop, and the hard drive was running at 100% for ten or more minutes. (My HDD has plenty of space, it is almost 51% empty).
I looked at the Apps that were using the HDD. Task Manager said that the anti virus was placing only low demands on the HDD. It was a collection of windows system apps that were taking turns to place heavy/red demands on the HDD.
One bright ray of sunshine, on my machine PR takes a long time to load up, and a long time to shut down, (with that HDD running at 100% again). But, once I am editing, PR runs quickly.
Best wishes
David Price
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I'll defer to those who have more Windows experience on why your system is seeing loads like that.
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I've always found PR rather slow but then I have a rather old CPU (a 3 core AMD Athlon II X3 440 running at 3ghz). I do have a more modern graphics card (an Nvidia GeFroce GTX 1060 6GB) and I found little performance improvement in PR from my much older graphics card. In full screen mode on the latest Windows 10, and in filmstrip mode, it takes 3s to swap to a JPEG or a NEF (in fast preview) and 5s to switch to a NEF in accurate (files on local disk which is not an SSD). Reducing the size of the PR window speeds film strip mode up so that suggests rendering is costing the time to me. I'm running directX 12.1. The comment I'd like to make is I never see PR using much of my graphics card at all no matter what I do. Right now PR is using about 1GB of memory and I rarely see GPU 3D go over 5% and next to nothing in Copy, Video Encode, Video Decode.
I only have one graphics card in this PC. I've tried windows game mode (made a small difference) and the trick to run PR as a high performance app (perhaps made a small difference). I've yet to hear anyone confirm their graphics card is utilised more than 5% (I might have missed it) so I don't really understand why people keep recommending updating the graphics card. Other apps (and especially games) I have, really do use the graphics card a lot more.
As an aside, I rarely use filmstrip mode as on some of my older images it can over a minute to render them as in the example I attached.
It doesn't happen with more recent images.
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I also meant to add that PR:
- uses a lot of my CPU when I'm not even doing anything (and I don't catalogue). It seems it is constantly fiddling with files inside the PerfectBrowseCache and writing to a log file. I believe what is happening is that if you open a new folder in PR, it builds up the PerfectBrowseCache in the background so if there are a lot of images in the folder it is working hard for quite some time.
- is constantly chattering over the network with googleusercontent.com and 40.112.243.1 (Microsoft)
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Compare above with this one when I go into filestrip mode on a new folder with a lot of images in it:
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Martin, I absolutely DO NOT trust Windows task manager to correctly report discrete graphics card usage. I just played around a bit and ran a graphics benchmark app called Heaven. Windows task manager showed ZERO GPU load and an increase of 3GB video memory usage. I compared this to what I see in GPU-Z a free app designed to monitor graphics card and it reported my GPU load @ 100%. I compared adding a layer in On1 and several filters and masked out to add a sky. Windows task manager reported zero GPU load while GPU-Z reported up to 20% load on my Nvidia RTX 2060.
I'm going to go out on a limb here a bit and say I think the graphics cards plays some part in image loading but is more critical for smooth brushing while masking, managing layers and other editing operations. Probably more important for image loading is use of ssd drives and how they are setup. As I said earlier in this thread I have OS and On1 app running on a NVME drive, images stored on a dedicated SSD and scratch and browse files on another dedicated small SSD. In filmstrip mode I switch between 40mb CR2 files in about 3 seconds on initial view of images and and almost instantaneous switching after viewing once in the same editing session.
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Hello David Price,
A few things come to mind. It could be that you're still seeing effects of the upgrade. For example other vendor's software or Office could be loading in changes on boot up. The virus program could be extra busy.
You can Google the Windows system process names that you see in Task Manager to see what they do, although the names have become more descriptive as time has gone on. It's also possible that a bot has compromised one or another processes, so do review your Windows anti-virus settings.
If the problem doesn't simply go away or can't be solved, I'd have a technician look at the machine. Around here there used to be all these small shops that would repair PCs, et cetera, and these people knew a lot. Unfortunately being replaced by Best Buy Geeks who can be good but often are not.
With Google and a bit of patience there is a lot you can do yourself, and it never hurts to know a bit more about what is going on.
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David Kick, Martin Evans,
Interesting discussion. I think in reading both your posts that Windows Task Manager does not show GPU usage. It's not intended to. But did Martin say that's where he got his 5% load figure?
In any case, load on the graphics card isn't really relevant to anything, except the lower the better. What is important is how much overall throughput you're getting with the graphics card compared to without. To test this you should do a graphics intensive task, like arrowing through a hundred slides in a filmstrip with clipping on, say. (Comes to mind because this is something I'll be doing a lot.) Do this with the graphics card turned on, and then do this with the onboard graphics turned on, and compare. If you're not seeing a substantial improvement then the graphics card is a waste. You could also compare two graphics cards on this basis, but that would involve some time swapping graphics cards in and out, although you may be able to right click and disable what you don't want in the Device Manager.
Martin, I also wonder if your computer is CPU bound given that CPU is showing 100% on yoour graphics. If CPU is the bottleneck then you may not get much benefit from a graphics card.
This is why it's always important to determine the bottleneck in a process. If you have a bottleneck, and often that will be one inefficient software piece, then changing any other thing in the hardware setup is not going to help much.
To give you an example, we run massive database queries in our application software. We have a tracer that let's us analyze disk performance for each individual clause in the query. Sometimes a very minor change to one clause will take the query time down from minutes to one tenth of a second. I won't bore you with the reasons, but the diffculty in software like ON1 has to be the editing stack. And thinking out loud, cataloguing should greatly help with that.
Given this information,
https://on1help.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035750991-Catalogs-and-Caches-ON1-Photo-RAW-2020
I think I need a reasonably large SSD drive for my workspace and also set my preview cache to a large number.
In summary, I'm going to try adding an SSD cache before selecting and purchasing a new graphics card. And 1 TB minimum for the SSD cache.
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One thing to keep in mind about the Cache Size setting is that it does not control the size of the cache on the drive. The PerfectBrowseCache will grow to whatever size is needed. The Cache Size setting controls a memory cache that the preview images are loaded into. A higher cache size means less RAM for editing but it should improve browsing speed as less I/O will be needed while scrolling through images.
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Thanks for your comments David. I downloaded GPU-Z and so far nothing I do reports any more than 6% GPU load. Masking, adding layers etc
My point is I believe the GPU is under used by PR (at least on my machine) as I have other apps that in resource monitor show much higher GPU load (and I'm discounting games).
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Henry. I only have one graphics card fitted to my PC.
If I turn clipping on and switch to film strip mode, I can scroll through images pretty quickly with never more than 50% CPU and less than 3% GPU load (reported by GPU-Z). However, this is not something I do so is irrelevant to me. CPU was high in the graph you refer to because MS backup was running at the time.
I don't understand your comments about windows task manager not showing GPU usage and it is not intended to - it does show GPU usage under the GPU view under performance.
Actually load on the GPU is significant and I don't really want a low GPU load if the thing I'm doing (processing images) is slow. It is a bit like having a big 6 litre V8 under the bonnet but the rev limiter set really low. I'd actually be happier if the graphic intensive operations I'm doing used more GPU and were faster. My point has always been that I experience slow PR in many cases when my CPU is not overloaded and the GPU is showing next to no load. I've even tried moving images to a fast SSD to try and rule out slower disk I/O operations but even then the GPU is barely used and although a little faster when scrolling in film strip (which I rarely do actually), the other operations (especially masking or clone/stamp) are painfully slow and the retouch brush even worse. I don't experience this with other software with the exception of Capture NXD but that doesn't claim to use the GPU anyway.
Another point is the creation of the PerfectBrowseCache. I'd like an option to turn this off when opening a folder. Ok, it has a purpose if you are browsing images and labelleing/culling but if you don't do that in PR and simply open a folder to edit an image, PR starts populating the cache with some expectation I'm going to scroll through images (but I'm not going to do that) and it takes CPU away from the operation I want to do - which is edit an image. You can see PR creating new threads to populate the PerfectBrowseCache as soon as you open a new folder and you can sit there and do nothing and yet PR is working away frantically trying to create a cache I'm not going to use. There is also no way to clear it so it just grows forever.
I've been a software engineer for over 35 years and worked on some very large projects so I know a bit about writing software (on Windows and Unix). PR is a decent piece of software let down in the areas of performance and testing. Other photo editing software is much faster on the same hardware for basic operations like the retouch brush and masking - operations I suspect a lot of people use. Other software pushes my GPU and is faster than PR so it seems there is a link here.
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Martin, I will comment more when I have my SSD in place.
As I don't have a GPU as yet I didn't know that was available in Task Manager. Yes, if the GPU is not used in code then that is a concern. I need to learn more about GPU's but I suspect all Photo Raw is doing with the GPU is outputting OpenGL. And your conclusion about them being able to do more may be well taken. Open CL shows a lot of promise but does the Photo Raw software make use of Open CL? No way to know.
But I'll stand by my point that a decrease in overall processing time is the only real measure on the effectiveness of a graphic card.
I'm a bit confused about cache and catalog. Is the catalog in the cache? It it's a catalog it shouldn't rebuild it every time should it? It should only touch it as you edit photos. I'll figure all this out when I install a cache drive later this week and then comment more.
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A cache is a place to store things for easy access. The Catalog is the database the program creates to enable searching beyond just the current Browser view. When a Catalog is created it generates previews for all the images and it stores them in the PerfectBrowseCache.
Without a Catalog the program will need to generate previews on the fly as you browse from one folder to another. This will obviously slow down drawing of those previews the first time you come into any given folder. RAM, CPU & GPU usage will increase while the previews are being rendered. When you create a Catalog you pay those system resource costs up front. System resources usage will go through the roof while the catalog process is taking place but once it has finished things go back to normal and now it's just a matter of pulling the previews from the cache.
This article may help if you haven't seen it yet: Catalogs and Caches - ON1 Photo RAW 2020
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Brian Lawson ..said
"A cache is a place to store things for easy access. The Catalogue is the database the program creates to enable searching beyond just the current Browser view. When a Catalogue is created it generates previews for all the images and it stores them in the PerfectBrowseCache.
Without a Catalogue the program will need to generate previews on the fly as you browse from one folder to another. This will obviously slow down drawing of those previews the first time you come into any given folder. RAM, CPU & GPU usage will increase while the previews are being rendered. When you create a Catalogue you pay those system resource costs up front. System resources usage will go through the roof while the catalogue process is taking place but once it has finished things go back to normal and now it's just a matter of pulling the previews from the cache."
Thank you for a nice simple explanation of what I see happening on my own lap top. It at last makes sense of all of the negative comments about Browse that are made by some users. I would guess that if you are using a Workstation, with a multicore CPU and massive Graphics Card, that even though Browse has to convert Raw Files into jpegs, on the fly. The power of a Workstation would make everything really quick and smooth. But, if you are using an old, and not so powerful PC, then you will have a different experience. The slower your PC, the slower Browse will run. Until you get the stuttering that other complain about. (I accept it as the price of not running catalogues).
I can now understand why Adobe forces you to catalogue every image. As it allows them to make their version of browse look smooth and quick, because as you said, you have paid the system resource costs upfront.
I know from experience that ON1's Catalogues make Browse run very fast and smoothly. (It is just that they place to high a strain, on my already struggling Hard Drive. So I gave up on using them).
So, if people are getting a bad experience with PR's Browse.. is the solution, just to catalogue?
Thanks for such a clear explanation.
ps. I am getting one of my lap tops fitted with an SSD, later today.
Question, when I get the hobby laptop upgraded, would it be best to delete the PerfectBrowseCache and start again from scratch?
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[I]f people are getting a bad experience with PR's Browse.. is the solution, just to catalogue? I don't know how to answer this except to report my own experience. I have my entire Pictures folder cataloged and I do not see the delays being discussed here.
When viewing images with the Filmstrip open you are viewing the image at full screen size. The previews are not saved that large so the image will have to be rendered before it can be displayed. This is especially true when the Browser is set to view in Accurate mode. System specs will have an affect on this.
[W]ould it be best to delete the PerfectBrowseCache and start again from scratch? No, just use the Move function in Preferences > System settings and the program will copy it to the new drive for you. No need to go through rebuilding it all over again.
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Hi Brian
Thanks for the advice :-)
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I'm glad I could help David.
One other thing I think everyone should be aware of is the program's Editing Pipeline. This is the order in which the edits we make get processed. If you have a lot of filters applied and there are various kinds of masks in them how quickly the program responds depends upon where in the pipeline the filter/mask you are working with falls. When you make an edit to something at the beginning of the pipeline everything that comes after that has to be re-rendered to account for those changes below. Things like Dynamic Contrast, Noise Reduction, and Luminosity Masks take more processor power so working on something below one of those will be slower than working on something above it or with it disabled. Using different Blending Modes will also have an affect. Of course how much slower is very dependent upon the system being used. I run an i7 2017 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon Pro 555 GPU with 2GB of VRAM. With my photos on one SSD and another for Scratch/PBC I'm quite happy with my system's performance.
When I said above that I don't see the slow downs this thread is all about, I don't mean things happen immediately. Returning to the editor with an image that contains many layers takes longer to load but I don't consider the time to be overly long all things considered. Working in the Browser in Accurate mode can take a second or two to display an image full screen and again, the more the edits it contains the longer it takes. There are times when things get so bogged down after long editing sessions that I'll have to quit the program and relaunch it and things return to normal.
The Editing Pipeline is discussed in the User Guide starting on page 8.
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