Slow smart album performance
This is probably a problem with the search strategies baked into Capture One's DAM that has not improved with version 23. While the time it takes to display a smart album has improved somewhat over the past several versions, it is still slow. In the context my 65,000 image catalog, it takes about 20 seconds to display any of my smart albums after selecting it. It also takes 20 seconds to edit any variable in the smart album.
It looks as if Capture One looks at the metadata in each image file every time any selection or change is made to a smart album. Database management should allow the processes in smart albums to be much faster.
So, is this a Capture One DAM design problem or is there a way to improve the efficiency in using smart albums?
Note: I am using a 3GHz 10 core Intel iMac with 64GB RAM and a Radeon Pro Vega 64 16GB graphics card. There is no difference when Capture One hardware acceleration is set to Auto or Never.
-
Capture One support suggests, "Can you please set the Sync metadata to ''none'' and see if it makes any difference? Also please make sure the preview size is set to recommended and even lower if that helps you."
Preview size is set for recommended and auto Sync is set to none, already. In the past I have experimented with varying preview sizes and found that this setting actually makes no difference on my iMac because Capture One has to recalculate the preview resolution based on the current preview window size. Also the recommended size for my system is 5200, which results in a huge cache and I have always set it lower. Anyway, it makes no difference in the 20 seconds to read all of the metadata and display the thumbnails in the smart album.
0 -
This sounds familiar.
Does Capture One become unresponsive during the 20 seconds it takes to display a smart album?
I've had issues with unresponsiveness for months, though of a more random and general sort, when switching between albums and tooltabs, etc. (more details here). I currently have around 56,000 images in my catalogue, and I use a MacBook Pro M1 with 64GB RAM. As far as I can tell, neither preview size nor hardware acceleration settings make any difference.
I've tried everything I could think of to find solve this, including reinstalling everything on my computer from scratch. No luck. So far I've had no help from support, who claim that they're still looking into the case – it's been six months now – and my conclusion is that the issue is with Capture One and its handling of larger catalogues.
0 -
Capture One is unresponsive while compiling the smart album. Also, once compiled, if you view another album and then view the same smart album, again, Capture One takes another 20 sec (in my 65k image catalog) because it starts the process over.
This implies several things: The smart album is just a filter, the filter process is repeated from the beginning every time you select the smart album, the contents are not saved in any way, and the DAM is not at all optimized. Capture One remains unresponsive because it is not adequately multithreaded and cannot make maximum use of available cores, or the database is locked to prevent you from altering metadata while the smart album is being compiled.
Using a smart album is at best a way to save a search. If it is located at the top level, it will search the entire database. If it is in a project, it will search for images only in that project and will therefore be much faster.
0 -
Does this happen every single time you select a smart album, regardless of how many images are in the album?
Here it's much more random; sometimes when I select a album, smart or regular, or a folder, Capture One becomes unresponsive, sometimes for a good deal more than 20 seconds, sometimes it doesn't.
In order to find out if smart albums were the cause of Capture One's unresponsiveness, I tried making a copy of my catalogue and then deleting all smart albums, but this didn't make any detectable difference.
0 -
It happens any time I select a smart album that queries all images, i.e., a smart album located at the top level. If the smart album is in a group or project, it only compiles images from that group or project, so the time to compile the smart album is less, appearing to be proportional to the number of images from which it is compiled.
0 -
Support suggested testing the time with AutoSync on and off. It made no difference. However, there was quite a difference when limiting the search criteria to one metadata field.
This search for images containing "any" occurrence in any metadata field takes 20 seconds to complete the smart album:
This search, requiring a search of a single metadata field takes less than 3 seconds and produces the same smart album contents. Capture One searches based on case, so it is simpler to do a search using lower case letters in case more than one form of the word is in the keyword entries.
If 'any" occurrence is specified, apparently Capture One has to search every metadata field, hence the inefficiency.
0 -
It takes quite a while here as well when using the "Any" option.
So far there hasn't been any indication that optimizing the catalogue system has any priority at all, so we probably aren't going to see improvements in this area any time soon.
0 -
You can speed up the smart album search process by using the "any " field in the search criteria (as opposed to the boolean operator in the Match rules field) just initially to find occurrences of a metadata word when you don't know what metadata field it is in. Then, copy that word as a keyword to all of the images in the smart folder, and edit the smart folder to find images that contain that keyword. Thereafter, use that keyword for any image you want to appear in the smart folder.
You can add several search criteria to "Match all" or "Match any" Search Criteria without having much impact on speed.
I sped up my search on my 65k image catalog from 20 sec to a little more than a second this way.
I sent this to Capture One support with the suggestion that the manual specifically comment on how to structure search criteria for maximal efficiency.
0 -
Support staff were able to reproduce this problem. Displaying a smart album that has to search for a match for any occurrence of an alphanumeric metadata entry anywhere in a catalog database is much much slower than one that searches for a single entry in a single metadata parameter (e.g., a keyword).
They were surprised that after the initial search for any such occurrence produced the smart album, subsequently updating and displaying that smart album was not any faster. I think this occurs because the coders chose to repeat the original search producing the smart album in order to update it. There may not be a faster way with the current DAM to update a search though all of the dozens of metadata fields for any occurrence of an entry. Given the current coding, limiting the search to a single metadata field is much much more efficient.
I suggested they explain in the manual the limitations of smart album and how to speed things up after an initial very broad search if they can't improve the coding.
0 -
Any news? It is still ridiculously slow for me...
0 -
No more news. It appears to be a limitation of Capture One. A search on a single metadata field is very fast, but the process for finding a word anywhere in any (among all) metadata field is much much slower.
My work around is to depend more on using keywords to search and reserving searching for "Any" occurrence of a word in any (among all) metadata field when that word is not a keyword.
0 -
Disciplined keywording will save you lots of time in general. It is more work up front but saves enormous time later.
0 -
Except that Capture One also becomes unresponsive for a while when you filter by keywords.
0 -
Are you just filtering, or are you making keyword changes WHILE filtering?
Making keyword changes WHILE filtering has always been a problem. I have reported it for YEARS.
0 -
When clicking on a keyword in the filters tool to filter by that keyword Capture One becomes unresponsive here. The bigger the catalogue, the longer the unresponsiveness.
0 -
I have not experienced that on the Mac version, but I almost always only search on a single key word at a time. Filtering 66k images takes about one second for me on my Mac Studio Ultra.
0 -
I split up my main catalogue into smaller catalogues to reduce unresponsiveness. Currently my largest catalogue contains 28.8k images. With this catalogue, Capture One becomes unresponsive for 13-14 seconds when I filter by rating, colour tag or keyword, and also when I clear the filter by clicking the X in the search field in the filters tool. This is on a MacBook Pro M1 Max 64GB.
0 -
There are lot of thing which are can not be replaced by keywords. Photos taken in the past 3 month, or photos with 3 stars or blue color tag or photos without keywords... and so on. So it would be much better to create a proper software... There are many application out there which are able to search fast in _huge_ databases, not in a few 10.000 photos' metadatabase.... It's a shame in 2024... and we don't need supercomputers to search in a database as small as this! (btw. I'm using an M1 max. Studio and my C1 database is on its superfast internal SSD)
0 -
I agree we should have better performing catalogs that should support hundreds of thousands of images if we choose. People create archives that represent their life's work - half a million, a million, even more - and want a single place that spans everything they've ever archived. I think Capture One knows this but it hasn't been among their highest priorities. They have made some improvements like more efficient previews (my catalog is half the size it was after that update). Much more work is needed.
There is a request in the new feature request system. Make sure you all go upvote it.
Request: Would love to see file/DAM performance improvements prioritized
1 -
To clarify my previous post about relying on keywords for searches. Peter Bujna makes a good point that depending on keywords is limiting. The good news, sort of, is that the speed of searching on keywords is not related to the keyword metadata field, itself. It is the result of searching on a single metadata field entry. For example, you should see speedy results if you searched for a color tag or a star rating. Choosing a search on multiple metadata fields slows Capture One down considerably in proportion to the number of fields in the search. Two or three fields is a few seconds, but if you search of any occurrence of an entry in any field, Capture One acts like it searches reiteratively for that word in each metadata field in sequence.This is very slow. If you create a smart album out of this search, it will take Capture One as long to display that smart album as it did the first time.
For people with large catalogs and need to do complex searches, Capture One is not yet satisfactory.
0 -
There is a request in the new feature request system. Make sure you all go upvote it.
Request: Would love to see file/DAM performance improvements prioritized
Thanks for the link. I see that you can vote again.
I wonder how Capture One, i.e. the relevant part of the company, imagines that users are to handle large photo libraries? Using third-party software. If so, I don't believe I've seen this suggested anywhere by any company representative.
0 -
I wonder how Capture One, i.e. the relevant part of the company, imagines that users are to handle large photo libraries? Using third-party software.
If so, they recently destroyed the only way to search for images in the third-party catalog and then pass the found images to C1 to edit them.
I created a ticket 7 months ago.
0 -
If so, they recently destroyed the only way to search for images in the third-party catalog and then pass the found images to C1 to edit them.
I created a ticket 7 months ago.
Another indication of their priorities. You can still open images in Capture One from within Peakto. When using Photo Mechanic's "Edit photo with" option, the import window opens in Capture One even if the image you're trying to open is in the catalogue that's currently. Was this always the case?
0 -
Hi Thomas,
I don't know. I once tried PM+ but with C1 sessions, and finally decided against using PM+.
In general, "Edit photo with" from an external catalog app is nice, but it is much nicer if you can open C1 with several images at once, because you can then easily copy&paste adjustments and metadata in C1 between these images, and you don't have to go back and forth all the time when working on several images.
Also, drag&drop images from the catalog to a session album without the need to re-import is a really convenient way to work with two applications.
In my tests seven months ago, dragging from a C1 catalog and dropping to a C1 session still worked, but not if the source of the drag action is a different app. I guess this issue was introduced in the C1 version which allows to assign individual variants of an image in an album, instead of all variants.
Btw., I can speak for the Windows version only.
0
Post is closed for comments.
Comments
24 comments