Turn Off High-Res Thumbnail Building?

[Jerry_Lodriguss]

Is there any way to turn off the building of high-res thumbnails in Photo Mechanic and just use the low-res ones to speed up the program?

I notice that on a Mac with an older version of Photo Mechanic (I don't remember which one cause I'm not on my mac right now) the thumbnails already in the file are displayed, and PM doesn't build a high-res display.

With the later versions of PM, the original file thumbnails are first displayed, and then PM starts to build a high-res version one by one. Sometimes this takes forever and you can do virtually nothing else on the machine, which is really a problem on deadline.

I've taken to doing a quick edit from the thumbnails in the older version of PM, copying those selects to a different folder, and then doing a final edit in the later version of PM.

Any way to turn off the building of the high-res thumbnails in the latest version of PM?

Thanks,

Jerry

[Kirk_Baker]

>> Is there any way to turn off the building of high-res thumbnails in Photo Mechanic and just use the low-res ones to speed up the program? <<

The simple answer is no.

What kind of computer do you have? CPU speed? OS version? How much RAM?

If generating thumbnails is slow for you then generating the previews must be really slow...

Regards,

-Kirk

[Jerry_Lodriguss]

Hi Kirk,

I use a Mac G4 powerbook with a 1.5 Ghz processor running OS 10.3.8 with 1 gig of DDR ram and Photo Mechanic 4.3.2 (yes, I will upgrade immediately to 4.3.3) ...

Using a Lexar 40x 1 gig card with a ZiO! hi-speed USB 2.0 card reader with 968mb worth of data on it in 250 JPEG files from a Canon 1D Mark II camera.

With the files on the USB card reader (not copied to the hard drive), it takes 2 minutes and 41 seconds to build the thumbnail images at thumbnail size 2 (160 x 105 I think).

On the hard drive, once the files have been copied from the CF Card, it takes 2 minutes and 00 seconds to build the thumbnails at thumbnail size 2.

In Photo Mechanic 2.3.7, the default thumbnail size is there immediately, there is no building the thumbnails at all. It takes a little longer than one second to build the large-size preview image.

Clicking on an image randomly while the thumbnails are still building in 4.3.2 takes about 3 seconds to build a large-size preview image.

So if you're talking about really pushing a deadline, where every second counts, I don't copy the files from the card to the hard drive because that takes 2 min and 33 seconds (for a full 1 gig card with these 250 files).

If I did copy the card, it would take 2:33 to copy, and 2:00 to build the thumbnails. That's nearly 5 minutes when every minute counts.

With Photo Mechanic 2.3.7, I can see the thumbnails IMMEDIATELY off the card without copying it to the hard drive.

So it would really be nice to have an option where PM 4.3.4 just pulled the thumbnails from the file like PM 2.3.7 does so there is no building of thumbnails at all if the default thumbnail size is set to 160 x 105 pixels, which I think is what is embedded in the camera file to start with.

Honestly, the embedded 160 x 105 thumbnail that is displayed in PM 2.3.7 is sharper with higher quality than what PM 4.3.2 is building anyway... see attached image comparison from a screen grab...



Please don't take this as criticism of the program, I love it.

But I just don't understand why it needs to rebuild these small thumbnails when they are already there, and these minutes are precious on deadline. I can live without the color management for the thumbnails and the previews.

Thanks,

Jerry`

[Kirk_Baker]

With Photo Mechanic 2.3.7, I can see the thumbnails IMMEDIATELY off the card without copying it to the hard drive.

So it would really be nice to have an option where PM 4.3.4 just pulled the thumbnails from the file like PM 2.3.7 does so there is no building of thumbnails at all if the default thumbnail size is set to 160 x 105 pixels, which I think is what is embedded in the camera file to start with.

Honestly, the embedded 160 x 105 thumbnail that is displayed in PM 2.3.7 is sharper with higher quality than what PM 4.3.2 is building anyway.

PM 4.3.4 is pretty much set in stone at this point.

Most people don't use the program with such small thumbnails. For those people, loading the EXIF thumbnail (which for many of them may not exist anyway) and then stopping will produce a horrible looking thumbnail as it is scaled up. Heavily sharpened images always look bad when scaled up.

I understand that for you and many others, every second counts, not just every minute, but why are you waiting until all of your thumbnails are loaded? PM 3 and earlier makes you wait until it loads everything before you can do anything. PM 4 does not. Just don't wait for it. It is designed to start working on what you scroll to. You can interactively scroll around in the contact sheet without waiting. You don't have to wait 2 minutes and 41 seconds to start using the contact sheet.

Secondly, while we support browsing directly off of the card, we don't recommend it since it is in our opinion a dangerous operation. Why? For a lot of people, the reason they stop shooting on a given card is because it is full. If they start editing (rotating, captioning, etc.) and the disk is full, they will start running out of space. Write errors will occur. Is this what you want to do with your *original* photos?

This is the reason we added background ingest. You can have Ingest download your images to not just one place but two (making a solid backup in the process), rename and caption all in one step, and while the photos are downloading you can immediately start using your photos as they appear on screen.

PM 4.2.1 and earlier did not have this function and a lot of people would browse off the card to save time. But I don't think that the risk is worth the time savings or really if any time savings is truly there. Just start the download and start working with your images as they appear.

For those people who always run at thumbnail size two, I suppose you could stop loading at the EXIF thumbnail and if you want sharpness, we do plan to add an optional post-scale sharpening step.

While we are continuing to talk about operating on deadline, you will find that the ability to better winnow your selections by using color classification and the fact that you can interactively FTP upload your images while you continue to work on the rest of your images should far outpace anything you can do with PM 4.1 and earlier including PM 2.3.7. The time to get your first image up on the wire is far less with PM 4.3.3 than it is with any earlier version of PM. You don't have to wait for the whole job to be done before you start uploading images.

I guess what I am saying is stop waiting for "2 minutes and 41 seconds to build the thumbnail images at thumbnail size 2" and just start working with your images. PM will do its best to keep up with where you are going. PM 4 is always working on what you are looking at, and if that changes (meaning you scroll down several pages in the contact sheet) it won't keep working on what you *were* looking at, it will be working on what you are *now* looking at.

But I just don't understand why it needs to rebuild these small thumbnails when they are already there, and these minutes are precious on deadline. I can live without the color management for the thumbnails and the previews.

Please turn off color management for sure then, because that will definitely speed things up. Color management is one of the main things that slows down thumbnail and preview generation. It takes about 30% longer to generate a preview with CM on than without. But definitely don't expect qualitative color judgment with it turned off. You can turn it back on whenever you want to see proper color rendition and turn it back off when you don't need it. The 'c' key will toggle it off when you are browsing the contact sheet, and it will toggle it when you are previewing.

Your particular camera produces fairly nice looking EXIF thumbnails. Not all cameras do. Some produce horrible looking EXIF thumbnails. I suppose people with those cameras would not use your desired option.

I did talk to Dennis about "an option to stop at the EXIF thumbnail." He didn't seem too keen on the idea. Your best bet is to write an email (maybe even this same message) to support@camerabits.com. It will be seen by the appropriate people.

Please don't take this as criticism of the program, I love it.

None taken. I think you are just used to working the way PM 3 and earlier worked and if you break the habit of waiting (and timing! [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] ) thumbnail loading and just do what you want to do, PM 4 will get you done sooner than you think.

HTH,

-Kirk

[Jerry_Lodriguss]

Hi Kirk,

Here's the way I usually work...

I try to do a preliminary edit in the camera as much as I can, tagging those files that I want to look at closer later.

When I open a card in Photo Mechanic, I want to go directly to those tagged files, and sometimes take a peek at a frame on each side for content, or perhaps for an identification. 90 percent of the files on my card, I never look at at high resolution, or even a larger thumbnail. I shoot sports exclusively so my situation is a bit different from most in that respect, but likewise, I'm pretty much always on deadline with night games.

The problem with not waiting is that if I know exactly what frame I want from the camera edit, I can go directly to it and open it in Photoshop, but then when you try to do something, like apply a Noise Ninja filter, it takes forever because Photo Mechanic is still building thumbnails in the background. For example, to auto-profile an image it normally takes 5 seconds, but with PM building thumbnails, it takes 20 seconds, or four times as long. It takes twice as long to actually apply the filter, one minute vs 30 seconds.

You say "just don't wait for it", but you do end up waiting, even with your suggestion. As a matter of fact, I don't wait at all, because I do my copying off the card of the preliminary edit in PM 2.3.7 because, the way I work, it's faster than PM 4.3.4. All I want is the exact same functionality in a newer version that I had in a really old one.

As far as browsing directly off the card, I've been completely digital for 5 years now, and I've done it every single day, and never, not even once, had a problem. Of course, I always reformat the card on a PC when I archive at night when I get home. I don't think it's much of a risk because I copy the preliminary camera edit to the hard drive first thing. I do not feel the need to copy and archive 225 files out of 250 that have no content or are out of focus.

I will try it your way for a while though and see if I can make it faster.

Thanks,

Jerry

[Kirk_Baker]

When I open a card in Photo Mechanic, I want to go directly to those tagged files, and sometimes take a peek at a frame on each side for content, or perhaps for an identification. 90 percent of the files on my card, I never look at at high resolution, or even a larger thumbnail. I shoot sports exclusively so my situation is a bit different from most in that respect, but likewise, I'm pretty much always on deadline with night games.

Perhaps another option is to do an Ingest but tell it to only download the locked files. Then you would cull most of them right away.

HTH,

-Kirk