DXO Photolab DAM problem

DxO PhotoLab
1

I have been using the trial version of DXO photolab for more than a week. and yesterday I decided to work on some old photos.

The folder that has all the pictures includes almost 20K photos. and everytime I run DXO PL to pick a specific photo or double click the Raw file, it takes long time to load all the photos and then open the requested one.

I can see the counter of pictures read is going fast, but still we are talking about 20K files!

and since I’m not a big fan of DAM. Is there a way to disable the option of reading the whole folder that contain the requested photo?

I found that creating a new project and dragging the raw file there will let me do what I want. But is there any way to cancel that step?

2

It’s really quite simple. Never have that many pictures in a single folder. Any software will struggle to cope.

Separate them out into sub-folders - place, event, year/month/day, etc.

I use :

Images
. Place1
.. Year1
... Month1
…. Day1
…. Day2
…. Day3
... Month2
…. Day1
…. Day2
.. Place 2
…….
Subject
…...
2 Likes
3

Unfortunately, there is no such control over the loading process in PhotoLab. Even when the progress meter shows loading is complete, preprocessing continues for some time. And even just a few hundred image files can bog down population of the image library. Recognizing what’s done is done - you have a folder with 20K images in it - it’s going to take some work to split that into more manageable batches. If using projects isn’t the best solution, maybe it’s best to leave that folder alone and copy the images in batches into a more organized group of folders that can be loaded into PhotoLab one at a time. Divide and conquer.

I don’t like working with virtual systems like DAM or projects, since I move files around a lot - so I rely on folder trees and manually organizing my images before working on them. It helps me in the long run. That said, I do wish I could cull large batches of images in PhotoLab more easily, since I can examine and compare them there with sharpening and other adjustments applied.

4

Hello Greg,
that is exactly why a DAM is so convenient. If you move, delete, create, rename etc… ffiles and folders WITHIN the DAM application everything is taking care of - including sidecar files. They would be automatically moved along the piture file.

If you do it outside of the DAM applicatins it is also not a big deal, you then just afterwards need to correct the path and point you DAM app to the new folder location. When you move folders outside of the DAM app you need to be careful of course that you include your sidecar files.

Sigi