Thumbnails : slow slow slow

[checkeys]

Another process which is running on the background is the raw conversion of photo's on the following location.
usr/syno/bin/dcraw

It would be really nice if Synology would include a few choices in the photostation setting where you can choose if you want these advanced conversion tools.

My photographs are almost all in raw and jpg available, so the raw conversion is really unnecessary for me.

[QuickThinking]

I've got the same problem everyone else has. If you enable PhotoStation, and then start using the default "Photo" share, thumbnails are going to take forever!

The recurring suggestions I've seen seems to be to use the Synology Assistant, enable the Photo Uploader tab, and go for it.

I've tried it, it's probably 5 times faster. Still completely useless for multi-Gigabyte photo collections.

However one serious issue I should mention, that I haven't seen in this thread, is that it changes the date modified on all the files uploaded. In fact, if you browse to the PhotoStation page within the NAS and try to upload from there it does the same thing.

I personally manage my photos by the dates they were taken, and every method except for simply dragging files from Windows Explorer directly into the NAS shares, changes the date modified for the pictures! In other words, I have no way of getting my pictures into the NAS without either letting their uploaders change the date modified on all my pictures, or turning off PhotoStation because the thumbnail creation for any sizeable collection is horrendous.

Just got my Synology today, strongly considering alternatives.

[BeJay]

QuickThinking -

The date changes annoy me too and have been mentioned in this thread, viewtopic.php?f=17&t=43590 where I gave my solution to the problem.

[D@ve]

It is very bad advertised, but the easiest way to get your photos uploaded with thumbnails is to use the Synology Assistant.

Typically, the option is hidden, download and run Synology Assistant and click the preferences and tick the photo uploader option, a new tab will appear!

You can now drag and drop your photograph collection into the window and clikc upload. Its a hell of a lot quicker than expecting the NAS's cpu to cope, also quicker than performing the telnet requests to remove the internal sharpen command line.

another thing, why on earth do Synology advertise using the java/web based photo station 5 to mange your pic upload and thumbnail creation when this is so much better?

Try it out peeps, its the best answer!

I was having issues with slow thumbnailing where it was taking 2 minutes per image

I realised that I had misunderstood the use of Synology assistant and was uploading using the synology assistant file browser.

Once I found how to enable the photo upload tab in the assistant then things sped up a great deal. The tab has to be enabled first or you will not see it in the assistant.

Folders can then be dragged and dropped in the window as above and your PC processor will do all the conversion.

I have an intel quad core 2.4Ghz and it is now processing at 1 image every 3 seconds. This is 38 times faster that the NAS CPU doing it, and it will take 20 hrs instead of the 32 days estimated using the NAS CPU.

I'm happy again because I'm very happy with the NAS.

Dave.

[MarkScott]

I have had my DS212J for only a couple of days but I am already concerned and affected by this thumbnails issue. I unwittingly activated Photostation and uploaded about 10,000 photos (by copying to a designated media folder) and shortly thereafter noticed that the background thumbnail generation had started and was proceeding rather slowly, and was maxing out the CPU.

Having now read about the issue, I don't think I want to use Photostation if it's going to take weeks to get my photos ready. I am happy to simply serve them up via UPnP/DLNA to any local devices such as my TV and PCs.

I've been pausing the thumbnail process, but really I want to stop it and make it go away. How can I do that? (I've disabled Photostation in the Disk Station Manager and restarted, but the thumbnail process starts up where it left off).

[peebee]

My experience of uploading from the Photo Uploader in the Synology Assistant is that it made no diescernable difference. I certainly didn't get 3secs per thumbnail like Dave - much closer to 60seconds.

My PC is running Linux.
Is the Upload Manager implementation different?

Synology techs where are you?
We're all having to guess at what's going on under the hood and therefore guess possible solutions.

Two days on and no reply to my support call.

Unlike Dave, I'm not happy

[QuickThinking]

Assuming I'm consolidating my pictures from several different sources. I've got pictures spread out over three computers and a few portable hard drives.

I want a logical structure to the photos on the NAS, so I don't just want to sync everyone's photos from wherever they stored them on their PCs, or even leave them in the same folders (otherwise I'd have five different folders named DCIM).

Initially my thought was, throw all the photos on the NAS, logically arrange them, and then sick a photo app like Picasa on them to take it to the next level. Now I'm not so sure, because the mandatory thumbnail creation effectively nukes the NAS as a place to organize pictures. Store them maybe, but it's too slow and broken to organize them.

What are your thoughts on how to avoid the limitations the thumbnail creation impose in this situation?
* Create a new share, organize there, then transfer to the Photos folder when I'm ready?
* Disable PhotoStation entirely, find another way to share photos through a web interface?
* Insert brilliant idea here?

[surge919]

2) Is there any change in the thumbnail generation in DSM 4.0?
I can't see anything mentioned on the Beta notes.
But surely this hasn't been ignored?

I pulled the trigger and updated to the 4.0 beta and I saw a difference... check my post on the previous page... a few days after upgrading, it finished my collection.

[checkeys]

2) Is there any change in the thumbnail generation in DSM 4.0?
I can't see anything mentioned on the Beta notes.
But surely this hasn't been ignored?

I pulled the trigger and updated to the 4.0 beta and I saw a difference... check my post on the previous page... a few days after upgrading, it finished my collection.

In 4.0 Beta it's still horrible. But this is normal on a DS212J with a 1.2 GHz processor.
On a iMAC 2001 with Intel Core i5 2.5 GHz it takes roughly 15s to convert a 4MB (12 Mpx) foto.
A 100GB database (25.000 images) would take 100 hours to convert...

How many photo's did you put into the photo folder on the NAS surge919?

[jeroend]

I have had my DS212J for only a couple of days but I am already concerned and affected by this thumbnails issue. I unwittingly activated Photostation and uploaded about 10,000 photos (by copying to a designated media folder) and shortly thereafter noticed that the background thumbnail generation had started and was proceeding rather slowly, and was maxing out the CPU.

Having now read about the issue, I don't think I want to use Photostation if it's going to take weeks to get my photos ready. I am happy to simply serve them up via UPnP/DLNA to any local devices such as my TV and PCs.

I've been pausing the thumbnail process, but really I want to stop it and make it go away. How can I do that? (I've disabled Photostation in the Disk Station Manager and restarted, but the thumbnail process starts up where it left off).

Hey Mark,

One way would be to move all photos away from the default 'photo' folder.

If you don't want to do that (like me), just remove the '/usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S77synomkthumbd.sh' file ('sudo rm /usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S77synomkthumbd.sh' should do the trick).

With regards

[briankcm77]

Oh dear. This is my first post, and now I wish I had bought a different product. I have a brand new DS411j with 4 lovely 2tb hard disks. I want to use this to manage music,video and photo files. Music uploads fine.

However, I have over 22,000 photos and some 200 video files to index, and each thumbnail is taking c. 5 minutes. At this rate the whole process will take around 80 days to complete. Nothing in the publicity material or handbook warns you about this, and I've seen nothing on this in reviews.

Reading these posts, some seem to be suggesting that the thumbnail processing can be done on the PC. I have a fast PC, but how can I do this then upload onto the DS?

I uploaded using file browser, and that process was slow, but this indexing is just unacceptable. I want to be able to read the pics on my smart TV (Ethernet wired), but it can only see the default folders music/photo/video, so moving them to another shared folder won't work for me. TV also can only see those pics which have been indexed/thumb nailed - same is true if I use Photo Station on the internet, so clearly this thumbnail process/indexing process is essential.

Why does the method of uploading affect the speed of the thumbnail process? i.e why should Assistant be faster at indexing than just using file browser to move files? Is the thumbnail process not the same, and only happens after the upload is complete?

Incidentally, there is no point is asking Synology for help - I posted a help request for a different problem during set up about a month ago and not a squeak back. Pretty poor customer service all round.

[SlowThumbs]

How is it even possible that the thumb generation can take so long time! Does it ray trace the pictures or what?!
Creating thumbnails shouldn't be that hard for a modern CPU.
If I open up a folder with 100 pictures on my 1 GHz laptop it takes only a few seconds for it to create thumbnails.
I know the 1 GHz processor on the DS-212J is weaker - but HOW can it be so overwhelmed by this operation that it takes hours to do the same job?!

My entire photo folder contains 8000 pics. It would take days, maybe a week to complete!

What I want is to browse my pictures (and videos) on the PS3 (DLNA). I only need a small, low quality thumb for each picture.

Now, in the Synology-world, a super computer seems to be needed to generate thumbs in reasonable amount of time.
Is it even possible to throw the thumbnails away and view the files without them on my PS3?
As far as I understand - as soon as you share a folder the thumbnail process starts and it can only be paused for a couple of hours.
I do NOT want the CPU to be running at 100% for a week! It makes the NAS slow!

I tried the Photo Uploader, but I wasn't impressed with the speed. It would take all day to complete, and I don't want to transfer the entire collection again!

This is just ridiculous!
How are the other NAS products dealing with thumbnails??
I can't believe that no review stated this as a problem!

[rossoneri711]

This is truly pathetic.

One great NAS box with a crappy picture management software. If its so crap then dont even bother releasing.

I honestly would be happy if i could disable thumbnails and conversions of my collection all together. Since i want to view my pictures on my gigabit network. Since i dont want to view them from outside my network i dont care if the picture is 10MB.

At least create a version that does this.

Also to everyone still baffling of this, just throw on Picasa on your PC and you are good to go. Thumbnails are way faster hehehhhee

[jmacd27]

I just bought a DS1512+ and up until I started uploading my photos I thought my purchase was perfect.

I am just about done uploading 92GB (20,000 files) of photos. It was painfully slow. I initially was uploading from Photostation. I checked in on the progress after a few hours and not even 100 files were done, totally unacceptable. I then found this thread and started using the Synology Assistant to upload, this has proved to be much faster. It took about 30 hours to complete, still way to long considering the processing power of my PC.

I still feel that this is not an ideal situation. There needs to be a faster way to get this done. Either have an option in Photostation to eliminate things like sharpening, multiple thumb sizes etc to speed the process from withing Photostation. Or spend some time and improve the Synology Assistant program to take advantage of modern PC/Mac speeds. I have a Intel i7 quad core computer and it was just about at idle during the conversion waiting for the Synology Assistant program. At the very least allow multiple instances of Synology Assistant to run, that way each instance can work on a seperate folder to speed things along.

Another issue is if you ever lose you connection, all of your file transfer settings are lost and you can't just hit a button to resume your upload.

I really hope Synology can address this issue with future updates. Photostation (and photo management in general) is one of the main features advertised to promote their products, so it should live up to the hype.

This is my only issue with my 1512+ (albeit a big one) and I am enjoying my Synology product in every other respect.

[Perplexer]

Hi there,

for me it's a nightmare, too. I'm going mad to see that kind of speed for my 90'k pictures....

I use a 212j and I really can't accept that kind of slow performance if I use the Syn.Assist.!
My i7 iMac needs up to 7 sec to build a thumb for one pic (4mb / jpg). I guess every third party app can handle it much faster!

Dear Syn. people. Why don't you use some algos. that calculates a complete folder with all requested pictures on the lokal hard drive? After all this one folder (incl. the needed sub's) could be moved "at ones" instead of every thumb of each picture

In my opinion there MUST be a solution for that issue. I love all other functions of me 212j

Regards
Per