PL6 stops loading all previews halfway with 'loading please wait ...'

I already have a week or so ago.

And to those who believe this is about numbers: I don´t think it is:

Images not loading until you click on the one at the time - DxO PhotoLab - DxO Forums

As you can see in the case I have documented, I only have 12 TIFF-files in the folder my PC managed to hang.

I run Windows 11, i7 gen 12 processor, 16 GB RAW, 1 TB SSD-disk and a good graphics card in a new Gaming ACER Predator machine that use to process 33MB RAW with Deep Prime between 3-4 seconds and Deep Prime XD in 7-9 seconds. So I have hard to believe it´s something wrong with my machine performance.

So far nothing has happened with the support case I registered except a mail. I think it would be good if DXO could take the time to participate a little more and come back to us in one or another way.

I think this problem might be related to the more extensive use of the catalog/database in version 6. Both Lightroom and Capture One have had and still have issues with performance. When People upgraded from version 20 to 21 of Capture One, and using the general database mood (C1 has a Session mood too) there was the same type of complaints about performance.

I had severe problems long ago with both Lightroom 5 and 6 and after studying Kirk Bakers Lightroom manual I underdstood there is a performance cost in a system that consists both of a databas/Image Library and a RAW-converter. The ImageLibrary needs small previews to be fast when users want to cull their images but they don´t want those previews when postprocessing their RAW/TIFF or DNG. Then 1:1 previews are more ideal.

In Lightroom they had a lot of different choices here to make and they were all compromises and so is the case in Photolab. In version 5 we had to zoom to RAW quite a bit before the system scaled a high-resolution preview.

To take another example: Photo Mechanic Plus 6 which is a highly specialized culling and metadata editing tool. It is fast as a flash because it is specialized and don´t have to compromise when it comes to the previews, like the compromise plagued RAW-converters of today with integrated image databases.

Normally I use to integrate Photolab with Photo Mechanic and one of the really important reasons doing so is that I can avoid problems like these by searching/finding/selection what to open in Photolab with the “Edit selected photos with - Photolab.exe” in Photo Mechanic. It works fantastically well when you don´t have to wait always for a whole folder to get a refresh of the previews. Here it will instead always open just the images you want to work with for the moment - it might be a whole folder but it might also be limited to just a few selected images.

… and if you are into metadata editing - don’t do it in Photolab - do it in PM Plus instead because it´s so much more effective. If you just turn on “Synchronize” in Photolab all the metadata changes will be replicated to Photolab immediately.