Indexing, tagging and CPU/MEM usage question

[flips]

Hi! Running 0.86 on macOS 10.12.6, quite new i5, 8 GB RAM, SSD drive.

I'm organizing quite a lot of photos in batches.

If I enter a directory with 400+ photos, XnViewMP uses quite a while just processing it.
Then when I do select all and change/remove/add categories, it's left working for quite a while, seemingly unresponsive. (Shown as "Not responding in Activity Monitor".)

This is not unexpected and probably quite OK.

My question is:
Is there a rule of thumb/recommendation of max number of JPEGs (3264x2448 pixels) per folder?

So far I've a few folders with 300-650 photos in each.
(Oh, and some of the photos are on a CIFS/SMB share.)

[xnview]

If I enter a directory with 400+ photos, XnViewMP uses quite a while just processing it.
Then when I do select all and change/remove/add categories, it's left working for quite a while, seemingly unresponsive. (Shown as "Not responding in Activity Monitor".)

Your pictures are in jpeg? Are you saving categories in XMP metadata?

[flips]

Your pictures are in jpeg? Are you saving categories in XMP metadata?

Yes, JPEG's, storing categories in XMP, not sidecar files.

[xnview]

so when changing categories, i need to edit the metadata of all your files, this can take long for many files
how long is it?

[flips]

so when changing categories, i need to edit the metadata of all your files, this can take long for many files
how long is it?

I think it froze/worked for 2-4 minutes when there was about 500 files to process.

I was thinking maybe there's a rule of thumb/recommendation for files per directory ...

[xnview]

I was thinking maybe there's a rule of thumb/recommendation for files per directory ...

The number of files per directory is not the problem, the problem is the number of files that you want to update by changing categories/rating/...

[flips]

Makes sense ... so I should limit that to batches of ~50 files?

[xnview]

Makes sense ... so I should limit that to batches of ~50 files?

yes better

[flips]

I think I'll split each dir into Months as well as Year, and it'll be ~50 in each ...