Thumbnails : slow slow slow

[LandscapeDecor]

Just posting my experience - I am a Pro Photographer.
I have a pair of new RS812 for storage.
Copied my first bunch of Photos (32000 images)
Thumbnails are progressing at 30 images an hour.
At that rate, it should be done in 43 days!
The average CPU is above 90%
My reading indicates an issue with unsharp masking each image?
If this is the case, it really should be an option that can be disabled.
It will be nice in a month or so, to see my images!

[benoitmalenfant]

Hi all,

Purchased a DS211J some time ago and never really used it for other than what a NAS is primarily meant for that is : storage attached to the network.

I originally dumped all my photos on the /photo folder using SMB (was running DSM 3.2 at the time) and the thumbnail creation took quite a while (ran about 3 days for 20K photos for about 40Gb) but I didn't really care since I was only using DLNA to view the pictures anyway.

Fast forward a few months, I upgrade to DSM 4.0 and was planning on using the 211J for sharing the pictures with family members over the internet. (Use to share them with picasa, but now that's it's been integrated with google+ I hate it...)

My problem is that when I open a browser session and point it to photostation, at least half of the folders/pictures have no thumbnail, instead I get a grey icon with an animated "twirl" inside (sorry, don't know how to call that "please wait" animation ...)

My problem seems related to thumbnail creation, but yet when I look at the media indexing service/conversion progress, everything is idle. Anybody seen this before?

[archean]

I have had the Synology for 6 days. I really like it, but... it seems to be converting forever. I assume this is photostation and media server. It says when i mouse-over the conversion circle in the upper right the bubble says: "converting 49099 photos and 2661 videos remaining". I dont have that many photos, and it just seems to be taking forever.

The photo number is decreasing (until I add more pictures), but it isnt decreasing very fast (every 20 minutes or so I think the number goes down, probably by 1).

Meanwhile, my PS3 can't see any titles (which I read is because its not done converting).

Is there anyway to speed this up?

[Detox]

I've been reading all the horror stories on this thread about copying photos to the DS using the Photo Station program.

Quick question. If all I want to to do is copy my photos to the DS and access them via another computer, PS3 etc, is the Photo Station program even necessary?

I'm really concerned because I backup a lot of photos from my DSLR Camera, and this is totally inacceptable if it's going to take days to convert a few thousand photos.

Many thanks,
Detox

[axj]

I have never used the uploading through DS-Assistant, but directly moved all my photos to another share on the DS and using resizing on a computer from 3456*2592 (3384KB) to 1200*900 (179KB) and these photos are then copied to the photo-share. The automatic thumb-generation of these takes nearly no time!!
On my photo-page (http://axj.dk/photo) there is one public album where the difference can be seen, but I don't think anybody can see any difference in these examples!! (It demands really good eyes to see that!).

[benoitmalenfant]

I've been reading all the horror stories on this thread about copying photos to the DS using the Photo Station program.

Quick question. If all I want to to do is copy my photos to the DS and access them via another computer, PS3 etc, is the Photo Station program even necessary?

I'm really concerned because I backup a lot of photos from my DSLR Camera, and this is totally inacceptable if it's going to take days to convert a few thousand photos.

Many thanks,
Detox

If you only want to use the DS as a a pure NAS solution (just like I did before enabling photostation) it works just like a share on any computer. The conversion does not need to take place and your pictures are available right away. The thumbnail creation mess really is a problem only when you enable photostation to take advantage of this service.

[benoitmalenfant]

I have never used the uploading through DS-Assistant, but directly moved all my photos to another share on the DS and using resizing on a computer from 3456*2592 (3384KB) to 1200*900 (179KB) and these photos are then copied to the photo-share. The automatic thumb-generation of these takes nearly no time!!
On my photo-page (http://axj.dk/photo) there is one public album where the difference can be seen, but I don't think anybody can see any difference in these examples!! (It demands really good eyes to see that!).

This solution (more of a workaround if you ask me!) was provided somewhere in this thread. The only problem with this is the fact that you need to duplicate every photo you want to use in photostation. It's not so bad when you only have a few photos to resize, but can be quite time-consuming if you plan on sharing thousands of pictures...

[axj]

It is a workaround! The time-problem was much worse 3-4 years ago, but the share holding the original photos is also a backup for the original photos. Why making 5 thumbs of big picture if nobody can see any difference if you use a picture, which is 19 time lesser? If I need a big picture on paper, I use the original one.

[remainz]

It has been made painfully clear to me that the photostation function of all synology NAS is unusable if you have a large collection of photos that need to be transferred over. Simply because the NAS doesnt have the cpu power to do the job of creating all the thumbnails. ( I think this is mainly a matter or bad coding but nevermind)

So the alternative is to do it on your pc first with Synology Assistant Photo Uploader.
This is still very slow, although much better, 4 secs each pic. But I see no reason for this to be so slow.
Windows or picasa create dozens of thumbnails per second. My cpu is running so slow it barely uses 1% while running the Photo Uploader. It is not a hard drive or network problem as files transfer fast normally.

Why is this ?
When will it be fixed?
This is clearly urgent as photo station is being mis-sold by your publicity and probably should be reported to trading standards.

[mickem]

Since I also uploaded thousands of photos and was looking for a way to increase the speed of my thumbnailing I decided to remotely thumbnail them from a Linux box achieving a massive speed boost.

Here follows a quick rundown of what I did some more details can be found at my blog: http://blog.medin.name/2012/04/22/thumb ... ot-months/

First I enabled and mounted the share via NFS from my linux box.

Code: Select all

sudo mount DS_IP:/volume1/photo /mnt/photo/

Then I created a scripte like so:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
echo "Running in folder: $1"
pushd "$1"
shopt -s nocaseglob
if [ ! -d @eaDir ] ; then mkdir @eaDir ; fi
for f in *.jpg ; do
if [ "$f" == "*.jpg" ] ; then break ; fi
echo "$1 - $f..."
if [ ! -d @eaDir/$f ] ; then mkdir @eaDir/$f ; fi
if [ ! -f @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_XL.jpg ] ; then convert $f -resize 1280x1280\> -quality 90 -unsharp 0.5x0.5+1.25+0.0 @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_XL.jpg ; fi
if [ ! -f @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_L.jpg ] ; then convert @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_XL.jpg -resize 800x800\> -quality 90 -unsharp 0.5x0.5+1.25+0.0 @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_L.jpg ; fi
if [ ! -f @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_M.jpg ] ; then convert @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_L.jpg -resize 320x320\> -quality 90 -unsharp 0.5x0.5+1.25+0.0 @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_M.jpg ; fi
if [ ! -f @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_S.jpg ] ; then convert @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_M.jpg -resize 120x120\> -quality 90 -unsharp 0.5x0.5+1.25+0.0 @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_S.jpg ; fi
if [ ! -f @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_B.jpg ] ; then convert @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_L.jpg -resize 640x640\> -quality 90 -unsharp 0.5x0.5+1.25+0.0 @eaDir/$f/SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_B.jpg ; fi
done
popd


And finally I changed directory to the NFS mount point and ran the following command:
In most cases you probably wanna try this out on an isolated folder somewhere (so dont run this from the root folder unless you know what you are doing )...

Code: Select all

find . -type d -name @eaDir -prune -o ! -name @eaDir -type d -exec ~/tn.sh {} \;

Don't forget to substitute ~/tn.sh with the location of your script (above).

Now this is probably not the best idea in the world since it most likely voids your warranty or some such but for me it worked and I think the only real snag is that the files have the wrong uid/gid set on the machine apart from that everything seems to be pretty identical to allowing synology to run this.

Would be nice if the people over at synology could provide a sanctioned way to do this...

// Michael Medin

[BeJay]

The work around mentioned above by mickem and others with similar 'hacks' is all very well for those who understand / want to play around with the CLI, but for the rest of us, we just want the product to perform correctly & efficiently.

This is just the same as the other forum threads regarding SSL Certificates - the simple import facility provided on the DS just doesn't work correctly, so the 'solution' is to hack away with the CLI.

This is not good enough Synology!

Remainz, suggests reporting to trading standards, well I've emailed a PC Mag that I subscribe to, who always give a glowing revue of the DS, but never mention these 'snags'.
I've not had a reply as yet.

[selecta]

Have just sent some feedback to Synology on this one. I have 17000 photos to convert and after it taking one day to convert 500 I have just given up using it.

Its going to be a dealbreaker for some if they don't sort this out which will be a shame as everything else works well and I am happy with my 211j.

Come on guys take this feedback into account and do something about it perhaps?

[convertfaster]

I bought DS212j not too long ago. It's been converting photos to thumbnails for more than 2 weeks. At the current rate it's going to be converting for another 3 weeks with CPU @100%. I just don't understand why such a simple task is take so long. Currently, it's processing one photo per minute or more.

I contacted support and I was told ARM 1.2GHz process probably can't work any faster and I should consider upgrading my computer to make Photo Uploader run faster. My two year old phone with 1GHz processor can generate thumbnails 50-100 times faster than this. Even Photo Uploader on my laptop take 5-10 seconds per photo to convert for some photos.

PLEASE fix slow thumbnail conversion issue!!

[JohnConnor]

PLEASE fix slow thumbnail conversion issue!!

I support this request.

[greetp]

Same thing with me.

32GB of photos now converting/indexing for 7 days, still not finished