How to speed up PSE5 Full Screen View of .CR2 files?

[Davidl]

How can I speed up [[>Full Screen View]] of Canon's .CR2 photo files?
Can I make software tweaks?
Would adding 1 more GB of RAM definitely speed full screen viewing?

STORY:

Running PSElement 5 under Windows XP Media Edition w 1 GB of RAM.
Full Screen Viewing of .CRW files was very fast [abt 2 sec/4 MB file]
Full Screen Viewing of .CR2 files is very slow [abt 10 sec / 14 MB file]

IrfanView displays the large .CR2 files full screen in about 1 second so it can be done.

This is very important to me because I scan a couple of hundred pix at a time to search for and tag the best ones in PSE.

Thanks for any help.

[johnrellis]

Unfortunately, PSE 7 is just as slow with a 14 MB .CR2 file, so there would be no benefit in upgrading.

[dj_paige]

Here are some suggestions:

More memory (RAM)
Faster processor
Lightroom 2

[Juergen D]

IrfanView displays the large .CR2 files full screen in about 1 second so it can be done.
IrfanView takes in my case about as long as PSE to bring up a CRW file in full screen. You may be looking at an embedded JPEG if yours displays so much faster.

Juergen

[johnrellis]

To build on Juergen’s comment, Irfanview is so fast because it is displaying the JPEG preview image stored in the .cr2 file by the camera, whereas PSE is showing the true raw image, with any edits you might have applied via Adobe Camera Raw (* see footnote).

For quick browsing and tagging of raw files, the PSE 7 Organizer is very fast at showing smaller thumbnails. And if you show the thumbnails at the largest size (3/4 as large as full-screen mode), it still takes just about a second for the image to show clearly.

I don’t know how good the PSE 5 Organizer is at viewing raw thumbnails. PSE 6 had a couple of bugs that would bog down your machine if you tried to scroll through raw thumbnails quickly. But PSE 7 is pretty speedy.

So if PSE 5 isn’t very fast at browsing raw thumbnails, one option (contrary to my previous post) is to upgrade to PSE 7 and use thumbnail mode with the largest thumbnails. More memory isn’t going to help.

(* Footnote: I took a .cr2 file and used “exiftool” to remove the JPEG preview image. Irfanview took the same amount of time as PSE 7 to view it.)

[Davidl]

New questions:
If adding RAM or changing PSE settings will not significantly speed Full Screen View under PSE5, do yous think that:
Q1: Full Screen view would speed up a lot if:




I add another GB of RAM,
set up a RamDisk,
copy a set of CR2 files into the RamDisk,
acquire and tag the files in PSE5,
embed the tags into the files, and then
copy these files back over the original files?



In my workflow, it’s the time delays between photos that kills me. I can do other work between mass file operations.

Q2: PSE5 can do searches in some of the EXIF field.
Do you know of a program that would do very fast Full Screen displays of CR2 files AND also allow insertion/edit of EXIF info in one of the fields on which PSE5 can search? I don’t think I can edit EXIF within IrfanView.

Thanks much for perspective. I wasn’t aware that jpg files are embedded in the cr2 files. Of course, Adobe could have written PSE to read these jpgs in full screen view.

Sharing info:
Since my CRW files [Canon S45 4 MB] were much smaller than my CR2 files [Canon Xsi 12 MB], PSE5 could read the CRW files about as quickly as IrfanView could.

PSE5 is very fast at displaying a succession of largest-size thumbnails of CR2 files. It just sputters on Full Screen view. Except for this major problem, it works like a charm on over 20K pix.

[TonyW]

I don't think any of those things will speed it up - my Nikon NEF files are the same way. The problem with full screen view is that it's generating the view on the fly - I think it may cache one or two but certainly no more than that. The thumbnails on the other hand are stored in the database - not the largest size but close enough that upsizing is quick.

If you are working with hundreds of RAW files then Lightroom is the way to go - that gets round the problem by storing large thumbnails. It takes longer to generate them (which happens when you add images to the database) but once they're are generated they show quickly.

Tony

[johnrellis]

set up a RamDisk
I don’t think a RAM disk would help, because the time to display a raw file is dominated by the CPU, not the disk. You can prove this to yourself by repeatedly opening the same CR2 file in Irfanview and observing that subsequent opens take about the same amount of time. On the subsequent views, Windows is caching the file in memory (like a RAM disk), so all the time for displaying it must be due to the CPU.

Do you know of a program that would do very fast Full Screen displays of CR2 files AND also allow insertion/edit of EXIF info in one of the fields on which PSE5 can search?
Perhaps someone else is aware of such a program. But if you do find such a program, you’d have to use it to do all your tagging before you first import the photos into PSE. Once a photo is imported in PSE, it will never notice any changes to the photo’s EXIF metadata.

[johnrellis]

If you are working with hundreds of RAW files then Lightroom is the way to go - that gets round the problem by storing large thumbnails. It takes longer to generate them (which happens when you add images to the database) but once they're are generated they show quickly.
I believe that LR and PSE use the same ACR caching mechanism for generating and storing large raw thumbnails. So I'd expect roughly the same performance from them when viewing the largest thumbnails.

On my 1280 x 1024 display, the large raw thumbnail in PSE is 1000 x 750. How big is it in LR? (There are other advantages to using LR for raw files, of course.)

[Juergen D]

FWIW, I just tried FastStone Image Viewer and it displays a full screen of my CRW files almost instantly. It does not show the full resolution image, it uses 2048 x 1360 pixels (not an embedded JPEG) for a 3086 x 2054 original. And it does not use the side car file, which contains any previous adjustment information. It would be a fast way, though, to view RAW images as they came off the camera.

Juergen

[johnrellis]

I just downloaded Faststone, which seems like a very good tool to have around.

But when I use it to browse to a folder containing CR2 raw files, it takes 4-5 seconds to view one. I noticed that if I just select a raw file in the browser, it takes 4-5 seconds to generate the preview in the lower left corner. At that point, I can open a full-screen view instantly. And if I double-click a raw file that's not currently selected, it takes the full 4-5 seconds.

I checked the Settings, and this seems to happen regardless of whether I have selected "Embedded Preview Image". I also tried File > Reload and Refresh (F5).

[TonyW]

I believe that LR and PSE use the same ACR caching mechanism for generating and storing large raw thumbnails. So I'd expect roughly the same performance from them when viewing the largest thumbnails.

On my 1280 x 1024 display, the large raw thumbnail in PSE is 1000 x 750. How big is it in LR? (There are other advantages to using LR for raw files, of course.)

John: Lightroom gives you quite a lot of flexibility. You can pick the preview cache image size you want when you import (the standard preview size ranges from 1024 to 2048 and quality from Low to High). You can also have it generate 1:1 previews if you want (although that slows down the import) and you can pick the time it keeps the 1:1 previews (so you can have them automatically delete after say 30 days). I tend to go with a 1440 medium quality preview which generates quickly on import and is good enough to be able to go and review. One difference between Lightroom and Elements full screen mode is that Elements leaves you waiting while Lightroom shows you the best preview it has available while it builds a better one if need be. That makes it at least seem speedy even if below the surface it may not be ;)

Tony

[Juergen D]

OK, I was looking at the embedded JPEGs, sorry. But those did display very fast.

Juergen