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Paul21964342eq00
Participant
March 22, 2023
Question

Elements Organizer thumbnails very unreliable

  • March 22, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 998 views

I am using Elements Organizer 20.0.0.0 on a Mac Mini M1 with 8GB RAM

My catalogue does not have any of the Media-Analysis settings turned on. All off.

The catalogue has about 100k images in it, but the thumbnails are constantly unreliable. Sometimes they are there, other times they are not. It hangs, its slow, it pretty awful.

Here is the question:

Will it work better if I create smaller catalogues? Maybe a catalogue per year? Kinda defeats the object of the software but its unusable at the moment.

 

Is 100k just too big for this product?

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Greg_S.
Community Expert
Greg_S.Community Expert
Community Expert
March 22, 2023

I know nothing about the Mac OS, but Monte307's opinion makes a lot of sense.  The size of the catalog itself should make no difference.  I currently have a catalog (on Windows 10) with close to 250k media files and have no thumbnail issues.  But I also have 64GB of RAM. 

 

Given the message posted by Monte, it may well help to move the photos to separate smaller folders.  However, if you take this approach, perform all of the moves in the Organizer's folder panel.  Otherwise, the photos will go missing in the Organizer and will have to be relinked, which is a very laborious task.

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Paul21964342eq00Author
Participant
March 23, 2023

Thanks for the comments but I am not convinced on the issue being MacOS.

The file structure is all left over from Lightroom, so its organised as photos per day. There are daily folders, within a year folder. This meets your comments on small folders. I have some code that reads the EXIF data and moves pictures to this folder structure now that Lightroom has gone.

However I think that irrelevant. I write a lot of code and have easily handled millions of files and much bigger databases on the Mac. In my experience Adobe sofware is often tricky in this area as its not 'core' to them - photoshop and editing works just fine!

I used Lightroom for years and it worked just fine but since they killed the product and made it cloud only I am left scatching for a replacement and this isn't it unfortunately.
I have updated to the 2023 product (not sure why it didn't tell me there was an update) and I will start all over again and see if anything changes.

 

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Paul21964342eq00Author
Participant
March 23, 2023

I have been doing more research and I have now uncovered the issues between Adobe Elements and Time Machine! Another example of Adobe not focusing on Mac support. The workarounds involve turning off/changing Time Machine (the excellent Mac backup tool) rather than fixing their software. Lightroom worked with Time Machine - Elements doesn't seem to.

I will see how the new version works but it might be time to move on to find a better solution

Monte307
Monte307
Inspiring
March 22, 2023

I am using Elements Organizer 21.0 on a Mac Mini M2 with 8GB RAM.  Just a guess, but the bottleneck may be at the Mac OS level rather than Organizer catalogues.  Do you have a huge number of files within a single folder?  That seems to result in very degraded performance at the OS level.  I tested on a folder with about 18,000 JPEG images in it, and trying to open them all at once seems to be impossible using Preview. It stops at 2,700 images, with the warning shown in the attached screenshot.  It might help to spread out your files over many folders, so that Organizer or the underlying Mac filesystem isn’t trying to bite off more than it can chew.

 

As for the thumbnails, have you tried Edit-Update Thumbnail for Selected Items?

 

    MichelBParis
    MichelBParis
    Legend
    March 22, 2023
    quote

    I am using Elements Organizer 21.0 on a Mac Mini M2 with 8GB RAM.  Just a guess, but the bottleneck may be at the Mac OS level rather than Organizer catalogues.  Do you have a huge number of files within a single folder?  That seems to result in very degraded performance at the OS level.  I tested on a folder with about 18,000 JPEG images in it, and trying to open them all at once seems to be impossible using Preview......


    By @Monte307

    I don't know anything about Macs, but for thumbnails, I don't understand why the number of files in a single folder would be a factor for issues in displaying the thumbnails. They are stored in a single sqlite catalog file named "thumb.5.cache" in the catalog folder. The thumbnails are stored as tiny 320x240 pixels binary records in that single file. That file would be typically 4 or 5 GB. So, I would not be surprised if the effect of the number of files per folder was only a 'preview' limitation.

    Other factors could be the size of RAM (8GB is the minimum requirement) and the available scratch disk size.

    So, before starting to reorganize your folders into smaller ones, I would suggest to create a new smaller catalog from a part of your library and to see if you still have issues with the display of thumbnails. Warning: don't manage your files from the temporary catalog, the changes would be ignored in the main one.

    Perhaps copy and paste here the report you get from the menu Help > System Info of the organizer. Do the same for the Help/ System info of the editor, the first lines up to the 'Scratch volumes' lines.

    Do you have many videos or raw files?  Thumbnails for raw files do require longer to be built:  the raws have to be opened with edits applied and turned into thumbnails; they are not simple jpeg thumbnails embedded in the raw file, they come from a full conversion and editing process.

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