Is Organizer 19 a memory hog?

[RedSanders]

I've just moved up to Photoshop Elements 2019 from PSE 14. I had not really used Organizer when using PSE 14, but having read the raves about 2019's version, I decided it was time to start using it. It took almost 2 weeks for Organizer to finish building its Catalog. The media count shows more than 87,000 items in the Catalog.

I continue to work on identifying "UnNamed" people as well as removing incorrectly identified faces in the "Named" area.  While the people recognition portion of the program works OK, it looks like I have a long way to go to get most/all faces identified.

I'm experiencing crashes to my system if I work in Organizer for a while.  The more faces I identify, or removed incorrectly identified ones, the sooner the program either closes, locks up, or even worse, locks up my computer.  In hopes of reducing or eliminating crashes, I've used Organizer's Catalog Manager to move my Catalog off the C:/ drive to another internal drive (of which there is ample free space) and to Optimize the Catalog. I also ran Ogranizer's Catalog Repair utility.

The only success that I've had is to use Windows Task Manager to monitor the use of memory by Organizer. As I work on work on faces in either Named or UnNamed People windows, Organizer's use of memory slowly climbs.  Here's what's really curious - pausing and hoping that Organizer will release some of the memory seems to have no effect.  In fact, its not unusual for Organizer's memory usage to continue to creep up until a crash occurs.

I've learned from others' posts in Adobe forums that they are experiencing the problems similar to this. They have learned that when Organizer's memory usage climbs up to the 50% to 70% range (as shown in Task Manager), it's best to exit Organizer, and then start it again.

I have left the memory allocation to PSE and to Organizer at the default value, which given that I have 16 GB of RAM, I would think is enough.

Anyone have any suggestions as to how to avoid Organizer using more and more memory, or must I continue closing and restarting Organizer when memory usage gets high?

Windows 10, Intel Core i7, 5820K CPU @ 3.30 GHz, 16GB RAM, OS on Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB drive.

[Greg_S.]

You have exactly the same hardware as I do, and with a large catalog, you are unfortunately experiencing some performance issues similar to those I have seen.  I don't know of anything you can do to improve the situation.  Are you receiving any Adobe crash reporters? If so, it is worthwhile to fill in the details of what you were doing when the crash occurred.  The developers will receive the reports and will hopefully take some action to improve the situation.

In case you are not aware of them, here are some suggestions for improving your workflow with naming faces:

I.   When working in the UnNamed People room, open up the stack to confirm that all of the images in the stack are of the same person.  If not, you can remove them from the stack or choose to ignore the faces completely.  After confirming the faces, add the name.  If you are not sure of whose face is shown, hover over the face and the full image will pop up.  I find this helpful in identifying the face.

2.  If you have a number of stacks of the same face, you can drag and drop one/more stacks onto another.

3.  You can select a number of contiguous/non-contiguous stacks by Shift or Ctrl clicking them.  Once selected, you can use the merge stacks command to name them.  If you have contiguous stacks, you can also draw a marquee around them to select them.

4.  In the Named Person room, if a stack has a blue exclamation point next to it, it means that there are faces of the same person available to confirm within the stack.  If they are all correct, hit Ctrl+A to select them all and then press the Confirm button.

One final point that I should mention: even when face recognition is complete, Auto-analysis is still taking place in the background for various reasons.  You can try turning if off in preferences and see if that makes a difference while you are naming faces.

[RedSanders]

Well Greg_S, I guess as the old saying goes, misery loves company! 🙂 

I've been performing #1 as you described, but I certainly learned from your steps 2 - 4!  Thanks!!!

You know, now that there are quite a few stacks in the Named section of People, I've wondered if I should try to complete clearing up the "Is this ???" in that section first in hopes that it might aid the facial recognition engine to reduce the Unknowns.  I've not come across any "best practices" by Adobe or individuals that alludes to this.

And I've read about turning off Auto-analysis, but I've been negligent in following that suggestion - up until now anyway.  I guess I hadn't taken the time to realize that that process only applies to videos.  However, I do have hundreds of home videos, and I'll bet Organizer has been chewing on them for a while.  I have soooo many photos and videos, I'm trying to be disciplined and methodical and tackle one major task at a time, currently that being identifying the folks in my photos.  Later tagging photos and videos, then editing both before sharing with our many family members.  Lots of fun and keeps an old man busy with a good purpose.

Oh!  And twice I have received a request to complete an Adobe crash report, and I dutifully completed them in hopes that someone in the Adobe dark tower might take notice. 🙂

Thanks again Greg_S for your response and suggestions.  Let's hope we'll see some updates from Adobe in the reasonably near future that will address this problem.

[Greg_S.]

Auto-analysis does not just apply to videos but it does take a long time if you have a lot of videos.  It is also involved with auto-creations and creating smart tags that are a good substitute for personal tagging until you have time to go through your media library. 

[edwinb97216184]

I have actually stopped with the auto analysis. it simply took way to long. It has been running for days and days and days and still i was on just 30%. So for my whole database i think the analysis will be running full-time 24/7 for a couple of weeks.

And i am simply not willing to do that.

Also, in Elements editor you can set the max memory used. Organizer totally disregards that. Sometimes it runs ok for a while and then it starts eating memory and all the 16Gb is taken, windows freezes and eventually crashes (been there a couple of times). Looks like there is a memory leak somewhere that probably never will be fixed.

I do also have another smaller database (~8000-9000 photos) and the analysis there took "just" some nights. but also with a couple of freezes/crashes.

[Jon in Indiana]

On this topic I would like to add that Organizer 2021 appears to have a serious memory leak as well. A couple weeks ago I upgraded from PSE 15 (which was working just fine) to PSE 2021.  It has been a disaster.  Every time I start the program it consumes 28GB of my RAM (I have 32 total), and then keeps asking for more. Windows 10 Pro starts swapping to the hard drive like crazy (I can hear the drive chattering at full speed), while my entire system is paralyzed. Organizer is frozen, my keyboard and mouse stop working, my system clock stops updating, CTRL+ALT+DEL doesn't work, my power button won't shut the computer down.  Task Manager even stops updating.  Before it froze, it showed huge numbers in the memory used columns (28GB) and the page faults column (tens of millions).  I've never seen anything like this.  If I let it run overnight, the next day it is quieted down but the app is useless.  If I kill and restart it, the same thing happens again.  This has gone on for days. I disabled all virtual memory settings in Windows so now it is not pounding on the hard drive all the time and I can still use the PC for other things, but PSE 21 is still unusable.  Today I opened PSE 15 (it's still on my PC despite the upgrade), and it tells me I have 3400 "missing files" with strange, alphanumeric names. I assume PSE 21 has messed up something. I opened 21 and tried to do a search for missing files.  It got to 23% and froze. I have tried everything I know short of uninstalling the software and reinstalling it.  Or possibly reinstalling Windows 10 altogether.  This has been very frustrating to say the least.  I regret buying the upgrade.  Any ideas on how I can bail myself out of this mess?

[Greg_S.]

@Jon in Indiana, the only time I have ever seen high memory usage like you was when I recently deleted the thumbnail cache on my 200K media files catalog.  It took over a day to rebuild the thumbnails and the active time that my media disk was being read was at 100% for most of the time.  The program was also using almost all of my 64GB of RAM.

So, let's find out a little more about your situation.  I suspect that your problem is related to the 3,400 missing files in your old catalog.  At least, it may be if you converted your old catalog to Elements 2021.  Did you?  Was the conversion successful or did you get any error messages?  Did you move or delete any files from your computer using Windows Explorer, rather than the Organizer?

If you didn't convert your old catalog, how did you import files into the Elements 2021 catalog?  Did you do a bulk import?  Did you do a backup and restore?  How many total files are in your current Elements 2021 catalog?

I don't think you have told us whether you have turned off all media analysis in Edit>Preferences>Media Analysis.  If you haven't tried that, see what happens if you do.

For one other simple trouble-shooting idea, try creating a new empty catalog.  What happens when you reboot and launch the new empty catalog.  If the computer remains calm, we have to conclude that there is a problem with your catalog, or else that you have a large catalog and media analysis is kicking in hard.