Speeding up Photo Thumbnail creation/viewing over NAS?

[katie279]

Hi all,

Apologies if the wrong place, but not entirely sure what the cause/solution is, so could go under photography, NAS, Networking or any number of other places.

The Christmas Challenge
I've got a couple of weeks off coming up and I'd like to sort my photo collection once and for all - not least since Google et al are increasingly tightening storage limits and with two young kids I'm pretty regularly hitting my cloud limit, doing a 'google takeout' and ending up with a pile of zip files of thousands of photos

The problem is that with the sheer volume of photos, I'm finding the fact Windows is taking a couple of seconds to load thumbnails of each image, really slows my ability to sort/delete etc

So..... I'm looking to speed up my gallery browsing as much as I can and looking for any advice!

Setup for doing this is:

- a high spec PC - 32GB RAM, new Ryzen processor, GTX 2080TI etc, so don't think that's too much of a bottleneck.

- this is connected via Cat 6 to Synology 918+ with ~16TB of storage

Thoughts:
- Mused a second CAT 6 Cable - not sure how big a difference this would make
- Adding a SSD to the NAS might help caching etc
- Looking into how windows pre-generates Thumbnails to see if there's a quicker way
- Have tried bridge and have ACDSEE, but I've never really warmed to them - always seem to be quite difficult to just delete/rename files as they're heavily fixated on non-destructive editing, tagging etc - however could just be me/lack of knowledge...!

Any other thoughts welcome - would be great to be able to really quickly whizz through my photos sorting them out!

Thanks in advance as always guys!

 

[Donnie Fisher]

As I understand it, windows generates a thumbnail database file in folders on the local drives when it reads through them, but I don’t think this happens on network drives.

When accessing the network you’re limited to the network in some regards, which bottlenecks not so much from the transfer rate of a file itself but the overheads in asking for the file that go before and after the transfer of the file.

for example, it takes longer to transfer 100x 10mb files than it does to do 10x 100mb files due to the overheads. So photos fall into that category of lots of smaller files.

As for your thoughts…
2nd cable, a fair amount of hassle and not always straight forward to setup.

ssd …. I’d argue it would have limited use in your case. It’s still going to be limited be there hdd being the original supplier of the photos.

what is the source of your photos? I have loads of canon raw and JPEG’s from the phones in the house. I used canon DPP software to sort through a ton of the images. Although a little old and clunky I found it to be the most reliable at selecting a lot of photos for delete and then working through deleting them.

an alternative approach might be to take a bunch of files from the nas and locate them onto the pc storage to sort, then copy back the smaller sorted folder to the nas.

For example, end of the night, grab 200gb of files to the pc, go to bed whilst copying, next day sort and copy back, repeat.

the pc storage will be waaaaay faster to scan through the pictures.

 

[katie279]

Thanks Donnie for your very helpful reply - lots of really useful thought in here.

I think you might be right - although feels odd this hasn't been solved (I wonder what creative agencies do in this case, I'd imagine they must keep files on central servers, but need to be able to access very quickly etc).

Anyway, what you suggest sounds like a good idea. I've just checked and I've got 350GB of photos/videos, so I could get a reasonably sized hard disk (eg 2-4TB to give tonnes of future growth), then put all my photos there with some sort of 'overnight sync' to move files to the NAS to keep that updated where there's backup protection etc.

Might have a look for any software that might do this - not sure I know what's the best software here, but will do some digging!

Thanks again!