Best settings for XNViewMP with 200k+ images?

[W1tchseason]

Hi all - fairly new to XNViewMP (or newly returned, anyway) so forgive me if this is something that has been discussed before.

Win11, i9-12900k processor, 32GB RAM, 2x2TB SSD drives, RTX 3080 with 10GB VRAM.

I have over 200,000 images on my data drive, and am trying to use XNViewMP to catalog them all. When I first reinstalled and did a complete index of my drive, the process took several hours - which is fine, I understand that. It's done now.

When I open the app it defaults to the root of that drive, which has ten folders and abbout 20 images. They are displayed immediately.
But if I then go "show files in subfolders" it freezes for about ten minutes before becoming responsive again. Both my databases are around 700k, I would have thought that my system would be faster at dealing with them.

What can I do to speed up the process? Is there a speed advantage of lossless vs lossy compression for the thumbnails? Is there a recommended thumbnail size that is fastest? I'm not worried about the size of the databases, I have plenty of disk space. Happy to start again from scratch if I need to rebuild the databases with different settings.

I've set max memory for db engine to 4000 MiB, enabled thumbnailkcaching with no maximum size set, disabled check integrity at startup - any other suggestions?

Many thanks.

[jkm]

The salient question is, When you do show files in subfolders, just how many images are you trying to show? One tenth of 200,000? 20,000 thumbnails?

Don’t. You don’t roast a whole elephant for dinner. Scrolling through a continuous stream of 20,000 images serves no purpose other than as a party trick. You cannot intelligently do anything with 20,000 images in a single sitting, so they do not need to all be viewed together.

If it were a much smaller number of images, that comment wouldn’t apply. But if it were a reasonable number of images, your computer wouldn’t be busy for 10 minutes. Check your resource monitor. What is happening with CPU utilization and virtual memory?

You say the cataloging process is done. What does that mean specifically? All thumbnails cached? What? 700k is an absurdly small database or cache for 200,000 images. So maybe you actually mean 700MB? Which is still too small. So it makes me wonder how much is actually “done”.

You’re welcome to post screenshots of your settings pages for Catalog and Thumbnails. Then people could opine on how you could optimize them.

Less data is faster than more data. Smaller thumbs mean less memory needed and less data transferred from disk and less computation. Turning off quality improvements means less processing. Some formats are more computationally intensive than others. All that means less time.

So settings can be optimized. But optimized for what? What’s the use case, what are you trying to accomplish?

[W1tchseason]

Hi, thanks for you reply.
First, yes I meant 700MB. Sorry.
Your comments are very reasonable. Use case? Probably nothing that a sensible dev would consider when building the software - but over the decades I, and others, have amassed about 200,000 images from various sources and not everyone has been sensible in what they keep, or where. So there may be 500 images of, for example, a wedding when ten would realistically suffice. So the main thing I wanted to do is scroll rapidly through the catalog until I see several successive screens of similar photos, then I can go into the relevant folder/s and prune them and move them somewhere sensible. I also just want to see what's there, nested in complex and/or irrelevant paths.
Resourcewise, 77 threads and 12GB memory in use. I know it's a huge task and maybe I should lower my sights a bit!
Thanks again. I think I need to see reason here!