Photolab 7 poor performance - almost unusable

DxO PhotoLab
1

Hi guys,

So I’m currently trialing Photolab 7 and am noticing the whole program is very laggy and quite unresponsive. Currently I have Affinity Photo and Topaz Denoise installed and am not seeing any noticeable lag or performance issues in either of these programs.

This poor performance in Photolab 7 is manifesting as:

  1. Long thumbnail load times in library
  2. Long raw preview load times in library, up to 6 or 7 seconds. When scrolling through hundreds of raw files, this can make the process take quite some time.
  3. Lag and unresponsiveness in multiple areas of the customise window including switching between different images, turning masks on and off, applying denoising algorithms, and even just the responsiveness of each of the tool sliders.

Any idea why this might be happening? I’ve already set default preset to ‘No corrections,’ tried turning on OpenCL, and changed to my dedicated graphics card for DeepPrime acceleration, none of which have helped. Also my photos are on my C drive, not an external drive. They are from a Fujifilm XT30 II, if that matters at all.

I feel like I’m missing something simple here, the fans on my cpu and gpu are barely even spinning up while using the program, which they always do when using Affinity Photo and Topaz Denoise. It’s possible Photolab is just a more efficient program than those two, but I would still think it would require the fans to spin up at some point, especially when applying the denoise algorithms.

At the moment these performance issues are almost making Photolab 7 unusable. It is so slow to do anything and is significantly increasing my photo processing time.

My laptop specs are:
CPU: Intel Core i7-11800H @ 2.3ghz (8 cores)
RAM: 32gb
GPU: NVidida Geforce RTX 3050

2

I’m running Windows 10 on an i7 - 6700 with 24 GB of RAM and an RTX 4060 graphics card. I’m not seeing the sluggishness that you are. I can say however that if you have more than around a 700 or 800 images in a single folder some people have reported that it does create a slowdown in initial loading, but not the other issues you are reporting.

Mark

3

Check that PL is using the GPU. Check the performance settings.

4

Same here. Windows 10, i7 6700K overclocked at 4.5 Ghz, 32 GB of RAM, RTX 3070… and performance is good!

5

Sounds like you may be using PL in a folder that contains many 100s of images …

  • For each image that PL loads it needs to apply all your previous corrections (OR the standard preset, for newly encountered images) to the source-file, and render the result - this takes processing resource … and it takes a long time if you expect it to “wade thru” 100s of images, just to establish a starting point.

PL is an excellent RAW image processor … It’s not so great as an image viewer - for reasons explained above.

  • It’s better to use another tool (say, Fast RAW Viewer) to review and cull images - and present a smaller sub-set of images to PL for editing/processing.

Each time that you switch between images PL needs to apply all your previous corrections to the newly-selected image, and render the result … which takes a second or so.

Like others responding above, I do not experience such lags and unresponsiveness.

  • Your system specs look fine to me - I cannot suggest any obvious reasons for this.

PL makes extensive use of your GPU only when exporting to disk (which is when the denoise algorithms are applied).

6

As others have suggested, how many images do you have in the folder you are trying to browse ?

7

I originally had 560 photos in there, so I split them into 3 folders of about 180 each. Still no improvement.

8

Situation on a 2019 iMac and PhotoLab 7
at “No Correction” and set to NOT r/w .dop and .xmp sidecars, in Photo Library view:

  • discovering 1277 images takes about 8 minutes with a CPU load of below 200%
    CPU load initially goes up to below 400%, then drops to below 300% before ambling away at the load mentioned above.

In customize view:

PhotoLab is not very good at managing resources and we cannot tell it to just show the previews of the RAW files. Most other apps can and do this to the benefit of usability.

Waiting is part of the price we pay for the quality we get from PhotoLab. Splitting folders doesn’t reduce overall time spent to edit a large batch of images, but it certainly helps to reduce the pain in UX.

9

Indeed. Other software does things like showing the JPEG preview in thumbnails, hoping you won’t notice it is not corrected. DxO are ambitious in trying to let you see the corrected image, even in thumbnails but, of course, that takes time.

I wrote my own DAM app, which browses, not only the current folder but, also, all the images in its subfolders. I am able to scan through over 14,000 images easily and fast. Even scrolling from top to bottom using the scrollbar is almost instantaneous but I do absolutely no processing apart from extracting the JPEG preview from the RAW files.

Surely, as long as the selected image is presented, processed, in a short time, it shouldn’t hold you up that long when editing? And, if you only show one row of thumbnails, that will help.

10

There is a absolutely a price to pay for high quality previews. I also gladly pay that price in Photolab since I have spent so many years using the early versions of Lightrooms many times terrible preview quality with my Sony ARW.

@biggestkid
Try using a third party viewer instead of using Photolab as a Picture Library. Try XnView or something else of your liking to open the files in Photolab. It use to work very well with XnView.

It is a good advice not adding more than 1000 pictures per folder i general and concerning Photolab these limitations are felt much earlier than at 1000.

In my case the “Develop”-mode in Photolab has no lagging as can be seen in “Picture Library”-view. So, I stay as much in Developing-mode as it is possible.

11

@biggestkid Nothing particularly special should be required.

So I tested on my slowest machine an i7 4790K (Passmark 8,069 - 2466) ) your i7 11800H is rated (20,479-3,077 somewhat more powerful than the i7 and arguably slightly more powerful than my Ryzen 5600G (19,886 - 3190).

I have three machines which are intended to provide data storage backup for each other (all HDD and 8TB + 6TB + 6TB).

All my tests were on images on an 8TB HDD but currently the cache on the i7 is set on an old NVME, I will repeat the test on the 5600G which has no NVME cache.

I downloaded 36 X-T30-ii and created a batch of 1,008 images.

Started PL7.80, the boot drive is an average speed SATA SSD, as is the E:\ drive as are the C:\ and E:\ on all my machines. On the i7 they are separate SATA SSD drives but on the other two machines they are partitions of the same SATA SSD.

Load time for PL7.80 is getting slower on that system and took 1 minute and 23.119 seconds (83.119} seconds)!!

Discovered an image and downloaded the optical correction in DxPL and then discovered the 1,008 images until the point when the count stopped increasing at 1min 3.325 secs (63.325secs).

With no correction applied the image to image time was 1.167 seconds.

Applied some corrections to an image and then copied to all images, this included DP XD and the image to image time became 3.13 seconds in ‘Customize’ and 2.119 seconds in ‘PhotoLibrary’ but the time actually varied somewhat.

PL7 configuration is

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Copied the images to the 5600G HDD with the DOPs, discovered a single image to load the optical correction and then discovered the 1,008 image directory complete with edits.

The PL7.6 load up time was 30.951 seconds and the 1,008 image load time with edits was 1 minute 14.173 seconds (74.173 seconds) and in Photo Library the image to image time was about 1.10 seconds. and it was the same in Customize as well!

The 5600G with an RTX 2060 is about equal to your laptop and the database and cache both reside on the E: drive which is a partition of the SATA SSD.

The “Folk stories” that accompany DxPL arise from those who encounter problems as you have. I deliberately sought out appropriate images for the test rather than use my Lumix images.

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I have applied ‘Soft-Proofing’ amongst other basic edits

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but I cannot replicate your problem.

So we need better ideas than that the image count is too high!?

12

Is the scrolling between pictures faster in “Develop”-mode tha in Picture Library in your case like in mine Bryan?

I don´t always experience sluggish performance in PictureLibrary but it happens from time to time.

My exports of RAW to JPEG works fine and usually it takes around 7 seconds with Deep Prime on (Sony ARW-files 33 MPixel). I´m very pleased with that.

… and have you tried to select a bunch of pictures and open them in Photolab? (Photolab and XnView shall both be open). It has to be configured in XnView. Then just rightclick and use “Open with” - Photolab. It use to be way faster using external software as a Pcture Library and the one in Photolab.

13

FWIW, my sony raw files are 80 Mbytes and I’m running PL 7 on an 8 year old dell latitude with 8M of ram. The only thing that is overly slow, to my tastes, is waiting for the default preset to be applied to a dir w/ lots (100-500) pix. That cld take minutes. Fixed that by:

  1. For every raw file, I also generate a light weight jpg. I look at the jpgs outside PL to cull the raw files. That way I process less raw files in PL speeding things up.
  2. I set default preset to “none”.
14

@Stenis Yes and I wrote about it a long time ago.

So

  1. In FSIV (FastStone Image Viewer) you can select any number of images from the same directory but because of the way the request is submitted to DxPL only one image, the last one, will make it to DxPL!

  2. In XnViewMP a number, up to a maximum of between 250 - 300 of my 20 megapixel images can be passed at the same time (that limit applies to any program that can manage more than one image at a time and the number may be less for larger images - I can test that with the directory of Fuji images I have created). Using tagging it is actually possible to tag images from more than one directory and pass to DxPL in one operation with XnViewMP.

  3. FastRaw Viewer (FRV) can pass the same number as XnViewMP, or thereabouts but only from one directory.

We have discussed using the technique of viewing and culling externally and then passing to DxPL many times in the past.

My issue with this post is that I have similar hardware to @biggestkid but with generally better performance??

One problem is that I have run further tests on and off during the day (I tired myself out gardening yesterday and then today the weather is way too miserable so I have been having an “easy” day) and it is difficult to get the same figure twice!

On the 5600G I get close but not identical image to image time between the PhotoLibrary view and the Customize view, e.g. 1.1+ seconds versus 1.4+ seconds respectively.

What I have also done is the following

  1. Copied the test directory to another subdirectory.
  2. Cleared the database
  3. Discovered and flip flopped between the two directories taking timings (all timings are manually taken with a digital stop-watch)

and
4. Taken the copy directory, changed the image names slightly and combined the two directories into one containing 2,015 images, I managed to create a duplicate along the way so it was 2015 rather than 2016!

and size definitely matters (or does it)!

The discovery of the 2015 images took 2minutes 7.772 seconds (127.772 seconds) versus 30.951 seconds for 1,008 images which looks wrong!

So I checked some reruns I had logged and they show 39.068 seconds for the original directory and 41 seconds for the same sized copy but I just cleared the database (again) and discovered the 1008 directory and it took 1 minute 22.870 seconds (82.870) and the 2015 directory took 2 minutes 37.094 (157.094)?

So I restarted the machine, deleted the database and repeated the tests and can I stop testing please.

  1. 1008 images in 96
  2. 2015 images in 193.903 but I reduced the number of thumbnail rows to 1

Empty database and increased the number of rows to 3

  1. 1008 images in 39.905
  2. 2015 images in 100.698

Empty database and increased the rows to 5

  1. 1008 in 51.84??
  2. 2015 in 74.188!!

Empty database and switched to 2560 x 1440 screen from 1920 x 1200

  1. 1008 in 39.677
  2. 2015 in 77.106

@Stenis I have lost the will to test!!

It appears that as many tests as I run will produce a different result!

One problem is the the 5600G is in a new build that I haven’t bothered to “shake down” so I will leave it there for now.

With respect to XnViewMP passing RAF images I certainly managed 340

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and the actual figure is somewhere between that and 350!

@PixPixPix I am glad the performance mostly meets your needs on older hardware and your image count is about my normal size but your RAW size is 4 times mine.

I presume that the light weight JPG comes from DxPL?

But for the JPGs there is software available to create a directory of JPGs from the RAW files embedded in the RAW.

Additionally XnViewMP can provide access to the RAWs (?the embedded JPG) for review cheaply (free or a donation), FSIV can access either the embedded JPG or the RAW for viewing (free or a donation) with the issue that it can only pass one image to DxPL and FRV can review the RAW for a modest fee.

15

You do realise that most RAW files already contain a full size JPEG preview? That is what gets shown in Explorer on Windows and Finder on Mac.

In fact, macOS Finder seems to provide a perfectly reasonable previewing and comparing mechanism without the need for any other software…

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16

@Joanna I was alluding to a piece of software I have installed somewhere which provided that facility but cannot find it or remember the name!

But LibRaw, the authors of FRV, provide a free utility that does the same thing

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image

PS:- LibRaw appear to have an offer of 25% off until the 12th Sept if anyone is interested in FastRawViewer.

I don’t get any commission but highly rate the product and unlike DxO I got some updates made to FRV some years ago, within days!

17

Do you mean that Windows doesn’t provide a built-in way to preview and compare?

Wow! The last version of Windows I used was XP and am I glad I switched to Mac.

How about Windows Photos?

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I’m not aware of any native “thing” on Win 10 that lets you look at raw files, at least not sony .arw files. The “light weight jpg” I spoke of earlier comes out of my camera as a separate file.

19

@Joanna Preview yes though typically the embedded JPG and compare ?

I have used FastStone Image Viewer for years and that has met my requirements as a general image viewer for free (actually for a donation) so I have never investigated what Windows provides natively.

I have never been tempted to move to a Mac and only felt they were vaguely worth considering with the coming of the M chipset. I have built all but two of the PCs that I have owned, and built for others as well, and Apple’s policy was and still is anathema to me.

Not particularly “lightweight” and I do also take both and use the JPGs with FSIV and XNViewMP, but the RAWs with FRV and DxPL and on occasion with ACDSee Gemstone, Affinity etc. etc.

20

There’s a lot that hasn’t been looked at yet. Do you know how to check virtual memory usage on your computer? (Also known as swap or pagefile.) Look that up and see if your C: drive is nearly full or if the pagefile size needs to be increased.

Is C: a HDD or SSD?

Also check the size of the cache in PhotoLab’s Preferences settings.

Run the resource monitor or performance monitor while using PhotoLab. (Start these by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete.) Is anything getting throttled?

Is your antivirus software working hard while using PhotoLab? It shouldn’t be.