Indexing folders of images on an Apple Mac

DxO PhotoLab macOS topics
1

Simple question : does manual indexing of folders of images complete on your Apple computer?

On my machine my images are stored in sub folders with one per shoot date. When I attempt to index my collection the process never ends and does not appear to do anything.

However, if I place a large number of images into a single folder and then index the folder the process seems to work with CPU usage increasing, fans running and the indexing finishing.

best wishes
Simon

2

I’ve run several tests for this and found that

  • Different versions of DPL take different amounts of time to complete.
    Times varied between 30 minutes and 90 minutes for a structure of folders
    that is at least 3 levels deep (approx. 25’000 files on levels 4 or deeper)
  • Indexing times were shorter when I deleted database files before starting
  • Approximate database file size, after indexing
    DPL2: 340 MB
    DPL3: 370 MB
    DPL4: 70 MB

This is how I did it:

  1. Point DPL to an empty folder
  2. Quit DPL
  3. Delete database and cache files
  4. Prevent the Mac from sleeping
  5. Open DPL and start indexing

We can see that DPL4 creates a lighter database than DPL versions 2 and 3, probably due to a new database design.

3

Today, I tested indexing again.

Before doing so, I deleted/renamed all photoLab components (database, cache, plugins, launch agents etc) - all except apps and licenses.
Then, I let Lightroom write all sidecars again (15 minutes for 25’000 image files)
Indexing the same lot in DPL2 took approximately 15 minutes.
Starting DPL3 imported DPL2’s database within 2-3 minutes.
Same for DPL4 and DPL5.

As you can see from my previous post, import was much quicker, be it because I had zapped DPL or because my Mac now runs with macOS Big Sur, or both.

In previous tests, I found that only deleting the database did NOT shorten indexing times.