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2022.5 Slow To Start And Hammering My Hard Drive Since I Created A Catalogue

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25 comments

  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    It is possible but I suspect there are other factors in play than just having created the Catalog.

    • You said "hard drive". Are you using an actual hard drive or an SSD?
    • Is the PerfectBrowseCache which is where the preview images created for the Catalog are stored in its default location on your boot drive or have you moved it to a different drive?
    • How much free space is left on the drive where the PBC is stored?

    I expect with 95,000 images the PBC is pretty large. I recommend, regardless of its size, that both the PBC and the program's Scratch space be moved to a fast SSD that is dedicated to just those two things. I have mine on an external SSD with its own Thunderbolt 3 connection to the computer. You want them to have their own connection so the I/O channel is not being shared with anything else to maximize the performance. You don't want to daisy chain it with other drives or use a shared connector for an internal drive so there is no I/O contention.

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  • Mike Hardisty
    1. The drive getting hammered is where I store photographs, that's a hard drive, not an SSD
    2. The PCB about 60 Gb is on my boot drive that's an SSD
    3. There's about 711Gb free on the SSD
    4. The drive where I store the photographs still has about 3.85 Tb of free space
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  • Rick Sammartino Community moderator

    Photo Raw will keep working on the catalog until it's done and then it will start again whenever it feels the need to to update itself. There are no options for the catalog other than the size of the previews it's building or where you want to store it.

    By the way, it usually takes most of a day to build a catalog with a lot of photos, if your was 15 minutes, that's nothing and it's not done yet.

    here is some further info if you're interested...

    https://on1help.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035750991

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  • Mike Hardisty

    The catalogue was already built. My problem is since then, every time I start PhotoRaw there's it takes about 25 seconds before I can do anything and then the hard drive starts hammering for about 15 minutes before it stops. 

    Before I built the catalogue which too all day, PhotoRaw would start and I could use it straight away and my hard disk wasn't taking a pounding

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    You're going to have to talk with tech support about this. I don't know why your drive should be getting hammered simply because you cataloged the images on it.

    When did you create the Catalog?

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  • Carl Traub

    Mike,

    I had a similar experience with catalogs, with around 65K RAW images ( about 140K including Jpegs).  Catalogs were on by default in 2019 and 2020 when I used them.  It would take well over 20 seconds to perform any action - open, zoom, draw a line with a brush, swap apps to or away from PR, etc.  OS is on an NVME drive, temp folders on SSD, pictures on HDD. I let PR do it's cataloging work for weeks, and it never got better.  I returned 2019 for a refund because of this un-usability.  I tried again with 2020, which was no better. support was not able to provide an explanation for the poor performance.  I found out that cataloging could be disabled, and I did that.  I've kept it disabled ever since.

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    What are your system specs Mike? A couple of years ago you said you had a 2GB NVIDIA GTX770 video card. That model is 9 years old now.

    2GB is the bare minimum that the program needs in order to run. Rick Sammertino had problems with his 2GB card and got a newer model with 4GB that solved his problems.

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  • Mike Hardisty

    My newer system is 

    Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10400 CPU @ 2.90GHz   2.90 GHz
    16.0 GB 

    NVIDIA GTX 2060 Super 8Gb

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    That should be a sufficiently powerful video card. You need to identify what exactly is hammering your drive with one of the system tools that shows you what is using the drive. I no longer have a Windows VM so I can't look up the right tool but I'm sure Google can help you find it.

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  • Mike Hardisty

    I removed the catalogue. PhotoRaw is now working really fast and the hard drive is nice and quiet. My folder structure on the drive is basically a folder called Photographs with subfolders for each year. Previously for the catalogue I had selected a folder called PHOTOGRAPHS GO HERE and added that as the catalogued folder, sort of like this.

     

    I am starting to add catalogue folders again but this time as the individual years, doing one year at a time. After a I add a year and it has reached 100% i then close PhotoRaw and then restart it to check response time for starting and to see if my disk activity acts like it was doing before. 

    So far, so good, response is fast the disk is not being hammered, but I've still got a long way to go

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    Sounds like a solid plan.

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  • Mike Hardisty

    An Update...Well, it looked like the problem was solved until this morning. After adding each year as an individual catalogued folder, PhotoRaw was performing remarkably well. The disk where I store the photographs wasn't getting hammered, start-up was really quick as well. All folders showed they were 100% catalogued

    This morning all change. PhotoRaw was extremely slow to start, five of the previously 100% catalogued folders are now being re-catalogued, varying from 0% done through to 24% done, and the hard disk is taking a pounding again.
    Correction, make that 8 folders now being catalogued again.

    I'm beginning to think cataloguing folders is just not worth the hassle.





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  • Rick Sammartino Community moderator

    I said in my post from 4 days ago that they will start up again. This isn't unexpected.

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  • Mike Hardisty

    11 hours and it's still cataloguing. 

     

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    That isn't surprising given the number of photos you are cataloging. 95,000 photos is going to take a while. Possibly a couple of days.

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  • Mike Hardisty

    Maybe you more experienced users can provide an answer. 5 days ago, PhotoRaw reported every folder was 100% catalogued. But I just seem to be going round in circles with this cataloguing business.

    11 hours yesterday, 10 hours today and it's still banging away at my hard drive. Some folders it reports 100% catalogued, ten minutes or so later the same folder has gone back to a low number between 20 and 30%, in some cases even 0%.

    Is this usual behaviour?

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    Unfortunately, yes it is.

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  • Carl Traub

    It makes absolutely no sense that it needs to re-catalog folders that have not been touched in years. Something is very flawed with the logic that determines when this task needs to be run.

    Tech support won't be of any help in resolving this.  Their suggestion to me was to disable catalogs. It solved my issue, but only by disabling a major feature of the app.

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  • David Kick

    I could be wrong but I think that quite a while back some folks had corrupt image files causing this problem. Not sure if it will help but check the corrupt files log and if any are reported move them to a location you are not trying to catalog and see if that helps.

    Corrupt file log on Windows is found at C:\users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\On1

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  • Mike Hardisty

    There was only one corrupt file that I deleted a good few days back. But in any case, I have sorted things with a very simple solution.

    I deleted the catalogue folders.

    Late last night all folders had been 100% catalogued, or so PhotoRaw reported. This morning, it all started again with most of the folders showing somewhere between 0% and 35% and the hard disk banging away again. Also PhotoRaw unusable with long delays between selecting anything or trying to move a slider.

    Now that I have deleted the catalogued folders all is peaceful in my world. 

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  • Subias Gilles

    Even if you have yet cataloged folders, 0N1 can display a negative progression value "-21,689%", or 0, or other random value; this for years and various versions. Unfortunately the ON1 engineers haven't develop an AI bugs fixes !

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  • Daniel Eriksson

    I'm also having issues with terrible performance while ON1 catalogs and re-catalogs my photos. If I remove my catalogs, it will also stop search from working in any meaningful way, right?

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    Yes, without Catalogs you can only search the currently viewed folder.

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  • Richard

    Would changing the size of your previews to minimal or medium possibly help? If nothing else, the smaller preview options can significantly reduce the size of the catalog and possibly some of the overhead required to generate previews and build the catalogue. The penalty is slower rendering times (but presumably no slower than having no catalogue at all) but you retain all of the other advantages of catalogues. More info available here 

    https://on1help.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035750991-Catalogs-and-Caches-ON1-Photo-RAW-2022-ON1-PHOTO-RAW-2021

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  • Daniel Eriksson

    I tried using minimal previews, but it did not help at all. The initial processing took forever in both cases, and it still does some sort of processing for a few minutes every time I open upp the app. I ended up asking for (and getting) a refund for ON1 Photo RAW 2023. I will go back to the 2022 version until I can find a better app. I might end up going back to Lightroom, even if I really dislike the subscription model.

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