Advance Search is very slow and crashes
I’ve been running into and Advanced Search issue and I’m looking for input from the ON1 Community. My photos are cataloged in year folders onto two drives; my most recent photos are on my Late 2015 3.2 Ghz i5 iMac with SSD drive and the majority of my photo folders are on a 7200 rpm external drive connected by USB 3.0.
My biggest issue is the incredible poor response of Advanced Search in catalog folders. Fifty percent of the time ON1 crawls to a stop and prevents the scrolling of photos (the beautiful beach ball is present). After 5 minutes the scrolling may improve or ON1 will crash.
Other notes, my cache folders reside on the iMac and Time Machine is partitioned on the external hard drive but I’m planning to move the external photos to a stand alone external ssd drive. Also, I’ve worked with the friendly support at ON1 but no solution has been provided during which time we did a complete reinstall of ON1.
If replacing the external hard drive does not improve performance I’m contemplating a new install of MAC OS 11.0 and installing all programs manually rather than using Time Machine. I’m open to suggestions.
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Are you viewing the photos in Fast or Accurate preview mode? Setting it to Fast will help as the previews aren't quite as high res. You can turn Accurate back on to view individual files and off when scrolling through large collections.
You have some control over the scrolling of large collections of images whether in Advance Search or not. I sometimes go my Pictures folder (on an external SSD with other data but no other PR stuff) and turn on the Show Sub-folder Contents to scroll through my entire 14K+ image library. It does stutter occasionally as the cache that holds the previews has to be dumped and reloaded with more previews as I'm scrolling through.
In Preferences > System > Browse Cache settings there is the Cache Size slider. It's somewhat confusing as it is grouped with the PerfectBrowseCache location controls but it does not control the size of the PBC. It controls the size of the RAM cache that holds the previews for display in the Browser. Increasing the size of the cache allows more previews to be cached and ready for display. I keep mine set at the 10000MB max.
I would also recommend adding a 2nd external fast SSD then moving both the Scratch Folder Location and the Perfect Browse Cache there. The scratch space is where the program does all its work while you are editing your photos. By moving it to its own device with with its own I/O channel you remove all I/O contention as other programs and the OS are also trying to use the internal drive at the same time. Think of it like a 1 lane, 1 way road across a bridge. With the scratch space on your boot drive with the OS's VM swap space and all I/O other programs are requesting in the background you get a traffic jam trying to cross the bridge. Each program has to wait its turn to cross. Having the scratch space on its own I/O channel, not connect through a hub or daisy chained with other devices, you've give PR its own commuter lane across the bridge. There is no more waiting in line and the program's performance improves.
Putting the PBC there removes its space requirements from your internal drive and it can grow as large as it needs without filling your boot drive.
I would do this before moving the photos to an SSD if you're budget doesn't allow the purchase of 2 SSDs right now. Once the photo has been loaded that drive is no longer in play until it's time to save the new edits in the .on1 sidecar file.
How much RAM does your iMac have? If you're running the 8GB minimum that will also have an affect on performance.
Here are the settings I've used on both my 16GB MacBook Pro and my new 16GB M1 Mini.
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Brian, I always appreciate the time you put into the Facebook and ON1 Support pages so thank you! As for the viewing, I was set on Accurate so I’ve changed it over to Fast and will see if it improves the previewing speed.
I do use the subfolder options and have noticed it also slows down a bit when the Advance Search is working properly. However, when it really slows down it can take 30 seconds to move in-between one or two photos and the slowdown occurs about 20 seconds into turning on the Advanced Search. It doesn’t matter if I’m scrolling or not.
I like your idea of a second external drive but my resources are tight and at the moment (two kids in college and one waiting in the wings). My Scratch Folder and Browse Cache are both on the iMac but the Cache Size is only set to 5000 mb. I have the option of leaving them on the iMac, moving it to a partitioned 7200 rpm drive with my TimeMachine, or relocating it to the new external SSD. I also have room to increase my Cache Size, my iMac SSD has 600GB available.
The RAM has been upgraded to 24MB and per Activity Monitor I rarely hit the limit.
Does preview size matter? My Preview Size of the local photos are set at Standard and the external photos are set to Minimum.
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I don't know how much the preview size impacts performance. I've always accepted the default size for mine.
You definitely do not want the scratch space on a spinner HD. That would have a dramatic impact on performance with all the fragmentation causing additional seeks to write anything too big to fit the current block.
My suggestion would be to partition the new SSD. Put your photos in one partition and use the other for the Scratch/PBC. Once the photo has been read into memory for editing that portion won't be used again so it shouldn't contend with the scratch usage during editing. Partitioning just keeps things cleaner. Look at your current PBC folder size to give you a starting point for how big to make the Scratch/PBC partition. Be as generous as you can for the scratch space and future PBC growth while leaving room for the photos side of things.
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I just thought of one more factor that could affect your display refresh speed—the number of previews you are displaying in one Browser page; i.e.; the size of the previews as they are being displayed. The more that are being displayed at one time, the more of the cache that has to be cleared and refilled as you scroll through the pages. Larger previews should put less stress on the buffer. I'm not talking about the size of the previews being saved and stored in the PBC, just how they are being displayed.
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This is great information. The SSD is arriving late this weekend so I will try some of these changes and post my results next week.
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Brian, what is the best way to direct the ON1 Cataloging to identify the copied photos on the SSD? The photos are identical to the photos which were on the old 7200 rpm drive. I'm guessing, I need to delete the catalog and redirect ON1 to re-catalog the new SSD drive.
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Yes, you must create a new Catalog for the new SSD. You can keep or delete the original as you need. Personally, I would get rid of the originals AFTER making sure I had a good backup of the new SSD. Photo RAW will automatically remove the old Catalog when it cannot find the folder that was cataloged.
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Brian, thank you for taking the time to work with my on my catalog issues, and finally, after two years I think everything is running perfectly. I believe my issues were a result of mirroring my photos on two external drives. Both of these drives had the same name and folder hierarchy. This backup solution worked very smoothly with Lightroom where I could show Lightroom the location of the mirrored drive and then the database would link to each file.
I think ON1 was confused with this method and I suspect this approach was causing the timeouts and spinning beach balls. My solution was to delete the application and all ON1 files except for a few settings and presets which I backed up and reinstalled manually. I figured most of the issues were with the PerfectBrowseCache but for good measure I deleted everything else.
Presets- How to Backup User Installed Presets
How to Manually Uninstall ON1 apps
After uninstalling I did a fresh reinstall and started the cataloging of my folders. So far, it appears everything is working well!
I’ve read many posted articles on ON1 trying to solve this issue, plus being placed on the ON1 Beta Test group. I believe ON1 should be a bit specific about how the catalogs work and provide additional guidance. I realize you’re only an end but so I plan to bring this to their attention.
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My backup is also a mirror copy of my pictures hierarchy. I have it on a volume with a different name though and I do not keep it connected to the computer at all times. I plug it in at night before I go to be so the backup can run then disconnect it during the day so it cannot become accidentally corrupted.
I'm glad things are finally working for your and welcome to the Beta test group.
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Brian,
I have just bought a new SSD drive to backup my photos like you describe above. I already use TimeMachine for a backup of my Mac but I would like to backup my photos separately as well. What software do you use to do this? Can I use Time Machine? Any advice would be appreciated. I am running macOS Monterey 12.4. Thanks.
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I use Carbon Copy Cloner in conjunction with Time Machine. However, I have excluded from Time Machine both my photos drive (because of its size) and my Scratch drive (Why?, It's temporary work space and the PBC can always be rebuilt.) Carbon Copy Cloner does a full backup of both my Macintosh HD boot drive (with its various partitions) and my external data drive which contains my photos. I run that daily.
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