Speed of Flattening in PhotoShop Elements 2019

[georgef85037473]

Recently the "flattening" operation in Organizer took a serious turn for the worse.  Any suggestions?

I've played with many of the "Preference" options that I thought might affect this operation, but with no success.

[MichelBParis]

Flattening means deleting.

Deleting many files has always been one of the slowest features of the organizer. Nothing new and you can't do anything about it, especially if you are low in RAM.  Try smaller batches.

[georgef85037473]

Mike, Thank you for the prompt response - will try your advice on batches.  I believe I have 16 GB of memory available.

Something recently got noticeably worse.  I was wondering if any of the background PhotoShop Elements processes (not all exceedingly helpful) could be getting in the way - and I could improve flattening performance (typically done one at a time after editing) could be improved by shutting them down.

Thanks again.

[MichelBParis · Accepted solution]

georgef85037473  wrote

Mike, Thank you for the prompt response - will try your advice on batches.  I believe I have 16 GB of memory available.

Something recently got noticeably worse.  I was wondering if any of the background PhotoShop Elements processes (not all exceedingly helpful) could be getting in the way - and I could improve flattening performance (typically done one at a time after editing) could be improved by shutting them down.

Thanks again.

Theoretically, avoiding background tasks is a very good idea. However, the intrinsic slowness of deletion will be still there. In such cases I shut down any other running application (Internet browers, music...) but I often find that external processes, especially from my Avast antivirus, are taking too much resources. In older versions, the result was often worse, deleting was not only slow, it generally failed after a few hundreds deletes...

[georgef85037473]

Mike,

I appreciate the responses.. however.. I believe the issue is intrinsic to Elements.  Things have improved slightly.. not owing to lessening the load on my iMac, but I think owing to allowing Elements to catch up with background processing of newly imported and attributed pics.   With Elements 2019 - is there an option to stop the program from trying to import photos from watched folders without turning any other background processing off?  Answer that please and I'll be happy with your kind responses. 

Thanks in advance...

[MichelBParis]

The dialog to define watched folders in the organizer is not in the 'Edit' section, it's in the 'File' section. You only have to delete any folder shown in this dialog.

[georgef85037473]

Thanks Mike - big help.  Let's declare this one solved.  Not clear how this interface indicates "finito."

[liana francois]

photoshop speed art