P: (Windows) Panel is limited to 1600 items (folders, keywords, etc)

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Lightroom bug - hit a folder limit and unable to select the newly imported folder.452497 photographs across many drives in one catalog.The S drive has 214341 photos. It's the largest drive and so had many more folders than the previous drives.S:\Master Photos\ contains ~1633 folders. I know that's a lot but that is how her filing system was started. Those are the sequential numbers from 2220 - 3853 but there may be a sub folder or two or deleted folder in there so that's why the number is ~ approximate.Folders are labeled "sequential number"-"date" so 3853-20150316Adding one more folder caused Lightroom 4 to not allow the last folder to be clicked on and not show any images. The T:\ drive (offline, collapsed and below the S:\ drive) was collapsed and the label was overlaid on top of the "Collections" section label. Updated to latest version of Lightroom 5 via her new cloud account, had it rebuild the catalog and the same problem occurred.Created a sub folder S:\Master Photos\2012 and moved 15 of the folders into that folder. The 2012 folder was expanded so the list was actually one row larger and the last good folder wouldn't open. I collapsed the 2012 folder and now all the bottom folders were accessible.It appears there is an object limitation or a fixed array or something that is causing the folder list to become finite. She said a similar thing happens on her keyword list until she collapses some of the groups but I didn't check that out.

[ScottyH]

Please see the image - I cannot scroll any further down the keyword list after the word 'coloured'. This is a much more recent problem than the separate keyword export issue I have just reported but it means that I cannot do even a manual fix of that other issue.Help much appreciated!Scott

[Guest]

If you're on a Mac, try Option-clicking the green dot in the upper left corner, the maximize window button. That should re-fit the window to your screen. I'm not sure if Alt-click does the same on Windows, though.

[ScottyH]

Hello Anita
On Windows I unfortunately see no green dot - I've tried a few other options but nothing seems to make any difference.
The other keyword issue I mentioned is now fixed but this problem is still in place so it means that they were not related.
Scott

[Bec Sowada]

Hi Scott,

This is a bug on Windows. The keyword list stops functioning after about 1630 or so keywords. The bug has been logged.

The one workaround we've found is to make the keyword list hierarchical by nesting keyword families together. This will shorten the list and allow more keywords to be viewed and/or selected and used.

Becky

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Lightroom LR3, LR4, LR4.1RC2: When working with a very long keyword list (~1500) and scolling down with the mouse wheel, the focus get lost after estimated ~1000 entries and the keywords below could not be selected. This error exists since several versions.
Workaround: using a keyword filter shortens the list and allows the selection.

[John R Ellis]

The same limitation occurs with the Keyword column in the Library Filter Metadata browser -- if more than a couple thousand keywords are showing (e.g. in Flat View), LR starts acting erratically.

Collapsing the hierarchy in the column isn't always a viable workaround. The only way in LR to reliably find photos explicitly assigned with a parent keyword is to use Flat View in the Keyword column.

[John R Ellis]

See this post for a workaround:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/59626...

[pdeeh]

also experienced by me, and sometimes it even crashes LR & laptop
not good - very annoying indeed.
quite unbelievable that this has been hanging around unaddressed for so long

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I have been working with Lightroom5.3. My list of keywords had gotten long so I experimented with adding hierarchy. I seemed to work as advertised with dragging other keywords under the parent keyword.

I left to do some other tasks. When I resumed I could no longer highlight (or select) a keyword in the list of all the keywords, let alone drag it.

I am using Windows 8.

[ssprengel]

This may be an operating system or programming language limit not something LR is doing different than how it was designed, which is what the term "bug" normally means. Any system, physical, or virtual, is going to have some design limits, and the only question is whether those limits will be encountered when using the system. The elevator in the building where I work has, maybe, a limit of 2000 pounds or is 6x6 feet square or whatever the actual limits are, so if too many people want to use the elevator at once, the limits may be exceeded and the solution is to split the number of people into smaller groups and use multiple elevator trips.

If I'm understanding what you're describing, it seems there is some sort of display-items limit, not an actual folder limit since collapsing a folder will let you see more, further down on the list.

I would suggest a simple reorganization of the physical folder structure, either breaking it up under 2 parent folders, a 2000 and a 3000, then move all the 2xxx folders under the 2000 and the 3xxx folders under the 3000 which should double the capacity but would require having to scroll down through 1000 folders with the other one collapsed, which still might be too many, so perhaps a more useful set of parent folders would be ones that have the year-month followed by the first sequence number by that month, so for your example folder, 3853-20150316, the parent folder that would contain it an all the other folders for March 2015 would be 2015-03-3nnn where 3nnn is not the literal folder name, but the lowest sequence number of the earliest March 2015 folder.

The parent folders would have both the month and first sequence number for the month so it'd be easy to locate the correct parent folder when either the date or sequence number is known. I have chosen to put the date part first instead of having the sequence number first, because the yyyy-mm is more of a regular pattern without any gaps so easier to scan down with your eye, and would also allow non-sequence-number subfolders inside if the organization is ever changed, it is unlikely that dates will never be part of the organization, so I put them first in the folder name structure. One more reason to put the date, first, is if you eventually find that older dates are rarely if ever needed, then another layer of parent folders can be made, but this time just yyyy-firstseq so an entire year's worth of subfolders can be collapsed at once instead of having to collapse individual months to get the list short enough to scroll to the bottom of.

There may be some other partitioning of subfolders in a few parent folders that makes sense depending on the subjects in those photos, but these ideas are what come to mind seeing that the existing folder names contain only a sequence number and date.
--
Basically I'm saying LR may not be able to accommodate the existing folder structure so the folder structure may need to be changed. Even if LR can be changed, it would take some months or years, perhaps, so what will you do in the mean time? Folder reorganization seems reasonable as a temporary if not permanent solution.

[John R Ellis]

The Keyword List panel on Windows LR does indeed have the same limitation on about 1600 items, at which point it fails ungracefully. The problem does not occur on Mac. As Steve said, the workaround is to introduce hierarchical folders and keywords.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Confirming what John and Steve have already said:

There is a vertical limit on how much data can be displayed within a panel. The limit doesn't affect the number of folders, just the number that can be displayed. As John has indicated, the workaround for now is to have a more hierarchical folder arrangement to mitigate the number of same-level folders.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Steve, thanks for the info. I'm already having her move into "Year" folders to keep the number of sub folders in the 300-900 range. She'll probably move to something like a Drobo or Synology system where all her images will show up on one drive so the "year" folders will have to be in place before that.

The report was more for the developers/documentation to be aware of the limitation as they probably didn't build at test case with 1600+ folders on an 8GB Windows 7 machine to see what happens. When that limit is hit, Lightroom eats up all available memory and doesn't gracefully close. Maybe a better error trap to make the user experience more pleasant, although I don't know what they would check for to trigger an error if there even is an error. Maybe some documentation on "possible system based limits" in the best practices section. Documentation is cheap. I know this is an edge case but it may help others if they hit this problem.

5TB drives are out and some photographers might not have a good folder structure.

If you would like to remove the word "bug" in the first line of the first post be my guest as this appears to be a system limitation.

John, thanks for the keyword comment. I wonder if it is the way Mac handles memory or your Mac has more memory than the Windows machine I was working with.

[John R Ellis]

"The report was more for the developers/documentation to be aware of the limitation"

Adobe is already aware of the limitation on Windows -- it occurs much more oten with keywords than folders: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/.... There have been many reports of people bumping into the limit with keywords, but this is the first one with folders I've seen over many years.

The Mac and Windows implementations of LR have different implementations for the lower layers of the user interface, and it appears that the Windows implementation of a scrollable list of items has a limit of about 1600 items. It is sloppy programming that the limitation isn't handled more gracefully, much less that there is a limit at all. There's nothing inherent in Windows that imposes such a limitation.

[john beardsworth]

" There's nothing inherent in Windows that imposes such a limitation. "

I understood that the problem is because Windows has (had?) an approx 32000 pixel limit on the size of a single control, and that Adobe haven't coded the UI to work around it.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

That is my understanding as well, John.

[John R Ellis]

It's true that a low-level Windows control can have maximum height and width of 2^15-1 pixels. But nothing stops an application from coding its own scrolling controls, using a low-level window whose height is less than the screen height (or using a library that has done this). Any Windows application that has to display a very large list has to do this (and most do). For example, Windows File Explorer can display lists of files that exceed 32K pixels. Even LR does so for Library grid view, which can far exceed 32K pixels in height.

[Carlos_Oliveras]

I recently started experiencing this problem. And this is happening in a program that is supposed to help in tagging photos? Still, seeing that this topic is 4 years old and the issue has not been fixed, does not surprise me. There are many relevant bugs that have been reported and acknowledged since 3-4 years ago, but they are never fixed.

I don't agree with LR team's priorities (or maybe it's marketing priorites) - I think bugs from 4 years ago should be fixed before adding new features like the ones in LR CC.

[Daniel Wiercioch]

I've spent a lot of time adding keywords to my photos. Well over 200000 photos. Probably several thousand hierarchical keywords. When I look at my list of keywords in the keyword panel, the list is truncate -- that is, I see about 90% of them, but near the end, the keywords stop showing and I can't scroll any further. I know the keywords are still there, because I can use them in searches. I just can't see or select them any longer. This was not a problem in Lightroom 5.

[Daniel Wiercioch]

Thanks for merging my thread in here. When I collapse some of my hierarchies as suggested, that allows me to work around the problem for now. Hopefully, Adobe addresses the problem at some point.

[SaraBequette]

I'm having this same issue on Lightroom CC (2015) - the newest version. I can't believe they still haven't addressed this issue! >.< Wow... 

[John R Ellis]

I just tested this problem on Windows 10 with LR CC 2015.6, and the limit is now about 3270 keywords, just about twice the former limit of about 1630.  I wonder if Windows 10 has doubled the maximum size of the underlying Windows control (which was formerly limited to 2^15 ~~ 33,000 pixels).

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I have the same problem with showing lists of keywords. My catalogue contains about 280.000 pictures, all with several keywords and now it is very problematic that not all keywords are shown in selections that are rather big (several thousands of pictures). I realy hope Adobe will address this beacause otherwise LR becomes rather useless for me.....
 

[Klozaw]

Same Problem:

I was looking for a keyword I couldn't recall. When I checked the Keyword list in the right side panel I noticed that the list stops at the work Oak.

I tried the Library Filter and it displays a little further, up to the phrase "OK Corral".

I know there are many other keywords.

I have a total of 4,838 keywords according to the Library Filter

Total of 160,000 images in the catalog.

Windows 10 Desktop PC

Sure hope Adobe can fix this some day.

[Hal P Anderson]

How can Adobe not fix this? Limiting users in this way for so long is unconscionable.