Dear @StevenL,
my last action before going in weekend. Is it possible that teh DB has no configuration for Drive/Folder
Nice weekend
Guenter
A pertinent question to ask is; do you actually need/want the DAM features of PL (for keyword searching, etc) ? … 'Cos if not, there’s a method of using PL (which I use) that makes its start-up time pretty much instantaneous.
John M
…which begs the question: what exactly does the indexing do? Does it render thumbnails and store them somewhere or does it only create an index of keywords and EXIF data.
Given that the DAW functions of DPL are rudimentary at best, I could à la rigueur live without them.
I do however want and need to browse through the thumbnails of my photos without having to wait for ages until they appear when I open a directory.
So, what is this method of yours?
And once again: does anyone know if DPL creates a catalogue with thumbnails and where is it stored?
P.S.: How does one quote in this forum, please? I can’t find the function.
On Mac there’s a $HOME/Library/Caches/com.dxo.PhotoLab3/ (and presumably 4, but I only have 3 in front of me) that contains both thumbnails and previews directories. What the difference is I don’t know, and it’s not immediately obvious how to relate the files nested under these (which all seem to be jpegs) to the raw files they’re generated from. I would guess that it’s in the database if you’re motivated to poke around, but I haven’t been.
The database is $HOME/Library/DxO\ PhotoLab\ v3/DOPDatabaseV3.dopdata (again, v3 in my case). The path isn’t configurable in the GUI. I’ve noticed that it’s listed in $HOME/Library/Preferences/com.dxo.PhotoLab3.plist, but moving it may not be as simple as just changing the path there. (Don’t know, haven’t tried.)
Leftmost icon above the editor field in which you type a reply, the quote bubble.
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Ah, thanks a lot.
Now we’re getting somewhere. That’s exactly what I was looking for.
Yes, it does - For a Win10 environment, they’re here: 
It’s doing a number of things, including the actions you’ve listed.
OK, firstly some background;
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whenever you open a folder with PL it needs to work thru all the images therein - matching them with any entries it may have for them in its database, or loading correction details from sidecar/.dop files that may exist for each image-file … before being available to the user.
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all this takes time - especially if there are 100s or 1000s(!!) of images therein.
So, the approach I use is to NEVER point PL at a folder containing many images. Instead;
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move small batches of yet-to-be-processed RAW files to a Work-in-Progress folder and work on them there - using PL’s option to work with sidecar/.dop files.
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as processing of each batch of images is complete, move all components of the results to a storage folder/structure (where you usually hold your images): All components consisting of {RAW-file + Sidecar/.dop + the Exported JPG/TIF} … then repeat with the next batch.
The downside of this approach is that PL’s database will have no idea that you have moved your images files from the location where it last encountered them … so, it cannot be used to store keywords and (when the History feature is enhanced) it will not be able to provide a history of correction steps across sessions. But if, like me, you don’t care about any of that then PL will always be ready-to-go for a new processing session, without any delay.
Either way, regardless of any workflow you may use - it’s best to use a dedicated image browser for general viewing of your images (such as XnViewMP or Irfan, etc) … as PL is not well suited to this task, for reasons you have already encountered.
HTH - John M
Food for thought indeed. Thank you.
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About ON1 X DXO PL, a bit late, I admit. I’m a big fan of ON1. The features of the software are wonderful, the video tutorials are so much better than DXO one’s, that are very long and with bad sound (it seems that people in DXO don’t know about microphones). I love to have panos, HDR and a lot of filters in a raw processor.
But when it comes to image quality… NR and highlights recovery are the main advantages of DXO PL but the overall export quality is better. And also the main problem in this topic: speed and usability. DXO PL is so much better. Im my 6 years old PC DXO has been always faster.
I’ve bought ON1 a good while ago as a fallback in case my LR6 would be killed altogether by Adobe. One never knows with them. Haven’t used it that much but I find the whole conecpt and their plethora of effects are aimed at people looking for ‘spectacular’ results with little effort. I’ve never felt the need to add fake snowfall or exchange the sky in my photos and would feel like cheating if I did.
I’ve made a few changes in my overall configuration, found a problem in the kernel of my NAS, and DPL is a bit faster now. Still far slower than LR6 but bearable. I do agree with you that the image quality from DPL stands head and shoulders above that from ON1.
If only DxO gave us a slider to control the sharpening on export. As it is, I still have to drag every photo through Photoshop just for the right dose of sharpening.
I presume you have looked at the Sharpen tool in Control points? Not to mention the overall sharpeners in the main menu - Lens sharpness and the unsharp mask?
Yes, with a preview. My workflow is PL4 (most stuff) -> Affinity Photo (cloning if needed, resize, sharpen, watermark, printing if needed). Different images need different amounts of sharpening; occasionally, I want different amounts of sharpening in different portions of an image.
There are other features I’d prefer that the DxO folk prioritize, though, and since Affinity will probably always be part of my workflow, I’m not too worried about the output sharpening.
As for ON1, the software had a bazillion features and a bazillion bugs (and, yes, I own it). I never managed to get any real work done with it. And it was slow… This was about 2 version ago; maybe they’ve improved. I like their feature set. PL4 has its problems, but I not only get my work done, but I generally don’t have to do much to get great results.
And for my wildlife photos, I love the DeepPRIME denoising.
Most of my photos are exported for screen and social media. I let the export function do the scaling, export in TIFF and then do the sharpening in Photoshop before saving the end product as a jpeg file.
Being able to control the amount of sharperning on export in DPL would let me do away with the extra pass through PS.
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