Photomator starts extremely slowly

[rudluc]

Photomator starts extremely slowly when I access my image folder in the Finder. I measured it: it takes 30 seconds until the thumbnails are displayed! This is really frustrating and annoying. It's not the computer. It's a Mac Studio Max under macOS 14.4. The photos are RAW files from various Sony cameras. Other programmes start at lightning speed.
In addition, the RAW photos from my new Sony Alpha 6700 are only displayed as grey empty areas.

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[Shelton]

Are your photo's on the mac itself or an external drive? My M1 Macbook Pro takes about 2-3secs to load

Shelton.

[rudluc]

Are your photo's on the mac itself or an external drive? My M1 Macbook Pro takes about 2-3secs to load

Thanks for your answer!
The photo folder is stored on a fast Thunderbolt SSD (2,800 MB/s).
Other programmes open it at lightning speed. I suspect that this is because Photomator always displays all 30,000 photos and not just the photos in a single subfolder. It would be so easy to change this.
If someone only imports a folder with a few photos into Photomator, this shortcoming is probably not noticeable, but there are also people with a large folder.

[Andrius]

Hi there, how many photos are there in all the folders you've added to Photomator? The reason why the loading times can currently be slow is that we generate a "library" from all the folders you've saved and, if you have tens of thousands of photos, reading the basic info for all those files can take a little while. We can try to simply read folders as you open them, but then there would be no "All Files" or "Edited" collections. It might not be a huge loss, all this considered, but it's a feature that some people do enjoy.

[rudluc]

Hi there, how many photos are there in all the folders you've added to Photomator?

It is a single photo folder with 25 subfolders for each year. There are subfolders for each day with photos taken (yyyy-mm-dd). As far as I know, this is a very common way of archiving photos.
In total there are 17500 JPG, 9000 ARW and 450 MP4.

The reason why the loading times can currently be slow is that we generate a "library" from all the folders you've saved and, if you have tens of thousands of photos, reading the basic info for all those files can take a little while.

Is it really the case that Photomator first creates a catalogue in a database and that you have to let the program work for a while (and only once)? Then you should be able to see this in a progress bar, but this is not the case.
I just notice that I sit in front of a grey window for half a minute after starting Photomator, even though I have a fast Mac Studio.

We can try to simply read folders as you open them, but then there would be no "All Files" or "Edited" collections. It might not be a huge loss, all this considered, but it's a feature that some people do enjoy.

The recursive opening of subfolders could be offered as an option. Some applications have an extra button for this.

[Martin Chalifoux]

Andrius, is the "Library" cached so that next time it opens much faster, or it needs to be recreated every time the app is launched or the folder is opened ?

[Christian Crayton]

It takes almost 10 minutes for me. Then once I do see empty gray boxes Photomator is so slow that I can't do anything. How do I tell it to stop trying to open these folders? And I specifically remember seeing that this was a quick snappy viewer, when the reality is that it is not usable in its current form at all. I have it looking at folders that contain over 69,000 photos, but none of the other software that I use has this much trouble with this task.

[Shelton]

It takes almost 10 minutes for me. Then once I do see empty gray boxes Photomator is so slow that I can't do anything. How do I tell it to stop trying to open these folders? And I specifically remember seeing that this was a quick snappy viewer, when the reality is that it is not usable in its current form at all. I have it looking at folders that contain over 69,000 photos, but none of the other software that I use has this much trouble with this task.

Thats because other programs use a CATALOGUE, photomator uses a FILE Browser. You have to think differently, I have a specific folder on my MAC that I dump new images in for sorting and editing, photomator looks at that folder only - my processed images are stored on my NAS. This way photomator is only ever looking at a cards worth at a time - which as you've found out it refreshes each time you fire it up.

I suggest once you get past the lag next time you remove all those folders its looking at, sorry if thats not the solution you are looking for you'll have to send the pixelmator team an email to see if cataloguing is something in the pipeline?

Shelton.

[rudluc]

No, it can't be because Photomator works without a catalog. I could name several photo management programs right off the bat that also work without a catalog and still display the photo folder at lightning speed: Apollo One, Nitro Photo, GraphicConverter, DxO PhotoLab, yes, even Adobe Bridge!
The long waiting time is already a nuisance when opening Photomator, which spoils the pleasure of using it.

[Andrius]

Andrius, is the "Library" cached so that next time it opens much faster, or it needs to be recreated every time the app is launched or the folder is opened ?

It isn't cached and that's kind of the way we've designed it – caching things would require a separate database file (i.e. a catalog) and that complicates things significantly. By all means, it's doable, it would just mean that shipping this browser would have taken a lot longer. However, it is something we may have to eventually do. Right now, the way that Photomator differs from other apps is that there is a temporary "catalog" created once you open the app so you can see every image from every folder in one place. The other non-catalog apps (like Apollo One, Nitro, etc.) don't have the ability to see/sort/search all your photos in one place – they work on a per-folder basis. This "indexing" is what takes up the bulk of the loading time.

Yes, for now, the searching in Photomator is pretty basic, but of course, we've tried to lay the groundwork for more advanced searching/filtering straight away and that's why we read the contents of every folder on launch.

As far as future improvements are concerned, we're planning to load the "All Files" catalog more lazily and allow you to browse individual folders while that's happening. If that experience isn't satisfactory, we'll probably have to look into a database of some kind.

It takes almost 10 minutes for me. Then once I do see empty gray boxes Photomator is so slow that I can't do anything. How do I tell it to stop trying to open these folders? And I specifically remember seeing that this was a quick snappy viewer, when the reality is that it is not usable in its current form at all. I have it looking at folders that contain over 69,000 photos, but none of the other software that I use has this much trouble with this task.

Oof, that's super slow – where are these folders stored? A lot of this is determined by the read speed of the hard drive – to stop Photomator from loading these folders, you can remove them from the browser when the library loads. You can also navigate to:

~/Library/Group Containers/4R6749AYRE.com.pixelmator/Library/Files Library/FilesLibrary.plist

And delete that file – make sure to do that when the app's not running. That contains the list of images and folders that you've added to the app.