I reported significant performance issues with the previous version.
Over time, the thread morphed into an AI-mask thread. I’m now sharing my experiences with the new PL9.2 in a new thread.
After the support team’s incredibly attentive service, I would have expected some kind of response from the development team.
Every problem was acknowledged, my patience and valuable cooperation were praised, and I was constantly asked for new data.
Looking at the new version now, I’m certain I’ve been strung along by AI. Call me ‘naive,’ but I actually know of companies where a bug report actually prompts a response and fix.
To edit images in a specific folder, that folder needs to be selected somehow. Windows provides standard dialogs for this. Opening a directory and displaying the names of the folders and files never takes more than a second. This applies regardless of whether it’s images, music, or text, even if the data is on a slow hard drive.
I respect the developers’ desire for a more visually appealing interface than the Explorer. However, if the custom folder selection on a hard drive takes a minute to display a folder with several thousand subfolders, then the programmers’ skills clearly lie elsewhere.
The idea may have been to examine all other subfolders before the user opens them. Even if this worked without any issues, I don’t see any significant advantage. If this behavior slows me down, then it’s unusable.
Eventually, the directory list appears, and I can navigate to the desired subdirectory. There are also many files there. I can scroll through the thumbnails, even if they aren’t fully loaded yet. If I move the scrollbar, the corresponding thumbnails are immediately loaded. After that, the process continues in the background for all other thumbnails in the folder. That’s how it should be.
Now I’ve edited my image and switch to a folder with 200 images on the SSD. At first, it looks perfectly normal. PL9 now recognizes that a new module is required for a new camera/lens combination. The download only takes seconds. Afterward, however, PL9 is blocked for several minutes. The cancel button is also ineffective.
During this waiting period, I start ProcMon and record which file accesses PL9 makes during this time. PL9 is now reading all the images from the folder previously opened on the slow hard drive. I have no idea why—I’m already working in a different folder on the SSD. Perhaps to finish building the thumbnails? This isn’t desirable in my opinion; I might not even open this folder again in PL9. Most importantly, this operation shouldn’t prevent me from continuing to work with PL9.
I have described this behavior to support several times. Their follow-up questions then focused on network speed, hard drive type, and GPU. All things that are irrelevant here. Clearly, a local SSD is faster than a hard drive in a NAS over a slow network. All of this is more than fast enough to browse a folder in Explorer and load an image into a photo editor. However, slower hardware is better suited to revealing inefficient processes within a program.
It’s a shame. As good as the image editing results are, the overall package is unusable.
Both cases should be tested for sanity checks.