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tempuseristemp wrote
I'm switching through photos in full screen mode and it takes 1 second to switch between current photo and the next. Any idea why? The lag is quite annoying when I'm trying to get to the 20th, 50th, or 100th photo.
I have a very modest config compared to yours, and I don't feel any slowness in the full view mode.
One second does not mean anything for me: the full mode automatically caches the next photo while the previous is shown, the next image is displayed instantly. Even if I use the filmstrip to select files at random, the images display in less than one second. Obviously if you want to click on the next button like a machine gun, not taking a glance at each photo, you are bound to choke the computer.
Also, you don't say if you are viewing jpegs, psds or raw files. With my 32 MB RAF files and my ridiculous computer, I have to wait about four seconds.
About your config:
What's good for Elements, as far as I know:
- RAM: yes, the more the better
- number of cores: does not matter that much, a fast processor is more important
- SSD: good of course, especially for the catalog and the scratch disk.
- Graphics: practically never used.
- Network: problems in many posts similar to yours. But your photo files are local?
I can't comment on your 'Places' problems, I don't use geotagging.
It's quite unusable as it is. Is there anything I can do to speed this up?
One suggestion, you could test a trial version of Lightroom. You have a wonderful config for that software. The advantage I see is that it is optimized for raw files and non-destructive, parametric editing; that requires a lot of power to display original files with all their edit commands immediately; the use of full size previews makes browsing very efficient. That said, take the time to browse the Lightroom forums: you'll see a number of complaints about Lightroom slowness...
.
From the description of your workflow, I am not sture either Elements Organizer or Lightroom will fit your needs (and expectations...)
Those tools are created to use catalogs to store information about your photo files and to group them so that you can select and work on a few photos found from vey large libraries.
Visual browsing is only a small part of your job, and it's generally not based on individual full screen views, but on page browsing.
Most of the power of those tools lies in two principles:
- you provide information (tags, captions, version sets, stacks, ratings, albums...)
- the tool indexes that information to retrieve your data very quickly.
For instance, I can retrieve all photos taken in a given year and with a given person and a part of a word contained in a caption in just a few seconds. Even with my low specs config and my big 60 000 items library. I can assign a given temporary keyword to all those 60 000 items in a few seconds, as much to remove it. 
Are you ready to take the time to
- learn those sophisticated tools, especially Lightroom?
- provide organizing information: selecting, culling, grouping and tagging?
- Assess the quality of your images by taking the time to view them at various magnifications?
I love that I don't have to waste time manually tagging photos.
Not my cup of tea... Fast and rational tagging is the main reason my overall workflow is much faster than any automatic searching and indexing (except exif/metadata already present in the files). By the way, the most important issue in the years to come will be culling.
You'll soon discover that your library will grow exponentially That will make managing your library a very hard task; visual browsing won't be of much help, even with very fast viewing. And in 10 years or more, maybe only 10% of your library will be worth keeping. And it's good to take the time to think about it: which pictures to keep? Very hard decision (for me as well 
)
Relying only on automatic organization is an illusion. So, in that first culling stage, when you are at it, take the time to:
- add keywords (the only elements which may survive in several decades)
- add captions, notes
- assign ratings
... and in your case take the time to view and assess the quality and value of your files (a single second may not be enough...)
Back to your browsing problem.
I was hoping the full screen perf issue can be worked around.
It's not clear whether you are speaking of the 'Full screen' mode (shortcut F11) or if you think about the single image view in the browser (maxed out zoom slider). The last one is much faster, and for all purposes, the best browsing speed you can achieve may be to set your zoom to show only 4 or 6 images and browse pages with down arrow.
This implies compressed image formats such as
JPG is probably opened as uncompressed bitmap which can be large and
slow. It's making an assumption that image is always being edited as
opposed to being viewed in full screen mode.
As a matter of fact, nobody will notice the time lag in jpeg decompression. The 'Full view' mode has two main purposes: creating improvised automatic slideshows (must show the image at best on full screen) --- and compare/analyse the quality of images even at 100% pixels view for selection and culling.
Like in other management softwares (browsers of databases), catalogued images also store a very small thumbnail (320 x 240) for superfast display when browsing pages of 50 images...
If the zoom factor requires more pixels, the image is resized, which explains why it is shown blurred and progressively sharper.
It's making an assumption that image is always being edited as
opposed to being viewed in full screen mode.. which I don't think makes
good sense. If Adobe can fix this in the next version that will be
awesome.
That has nothing to do with the need to edit, it's the need to view for two different purposes: visual recognition (superfast and very low resolution) and quality assessment. There is next to nothing that Adobe can do about it.
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