PSE7 Organizer - What's it doing on startup?

[mbrowne]

I've only opened Organizer once or twice in the 6 months or so I've been using Elements, preferring FastStone as a frontend to the Editor.

But I tried it today in an attempt to catalog my images. It opens and spends years "generating thumbnails," not letting me actually work with it. I've tried disabling all the auto functions I can find in Preferences. How can I get it to just open? And why does it think it needs to be doing anything I don't tell it to do? Thanks for any help.

[johnrellis]

It opens and spends years "generating thumbnails," not letting me actually work with it.

It is generating thumbnails for all the images you've explicitly or implicitly imported into the catalog. It only does this once for each image, remembering them in a "thumbnail cache" (a database file in your catalog). As a crude rule of thumb, PSE 6/7 generates about 5K to 10K thumbnails per hour, so it can take a while for a large catalog.

For people who use the Organizer regularly, generation of thumbnails is rarely noticeable, since you typically import at most a couple hundred pics at a time. The generation is supposed to occur "in background", but generating the thumbnails of hundreds of photos does tend to slow down PSE quite a bit to the point of making slower machines nearly unusable (e.g. on my laptop). But it's rarely an issue for me, since I rarely import that many photos all at once.

So if you let PSE finish generating the thumbnails, and you use the Organizer regularly, you shouldn't have any problems. You may have a large number of photos in your catalog due to the Watch Folders feature automatically importing photos from your Pictures folder.

Pretty much every image browser and organizer has to generate and save away thumbnails. Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery seem to do a better job than PSE of doing it unobtrusively in background. I believe FastStone does it folder-by-folder as you visit the folder, which also tends to be unobtrusive.