Photoshop CS/File Browser speed on XP

[tim]

I thought i'd share my experience, it might help someone else out.

I just did an interesting little experiment with Photoshop. My home PC is an Acer Desknote 1703, a P4 2.66 with 768 MB of RAM - kindof a cross between a desktop and a notebook, with a 17 inch LCD built in. It's a couple of years old, but it's specs are still pretty good. It's big and heavy, and has started annoying me.

Anyway, I installed Photoshop CS on my work PC, which is a standard P4 2.8 hyperthreaded with 1GB of RAM. The file browser is much, much faster, and much smoother, and is a joy to use compared with my home machine.

The moral of the story is to stick to standard hardware where possible. I'll be selling my home machine and upgrading to a dual core Athlon 64 once they come out, unless I get impatient and get one before then :)

[chris.bailey]

I have found the file browser to be very processor intensive, to the point where I dont use it at all on my (ageing) laptop. Helps also not to have any other programmes running at the same time.

[CyberDyneSystems]

The browser in PSCS is so slow I will not use it.

Thus far the fastest Browser I have seen for jegs and otehr "conventional" image files is ACDsee...

The fastest RAW browser is "BReezeBrowser" with the [possible exception of the new fee RAW utility .. (what's it called? RawShooter?) But I can't get raw shooter to work on an AMD platform :(

[Scottes]

The browser in PSCS is so slow I will not use it.
Same here. The browser's speed is one of the reason I won't do RAW in PS. My machine had slowed to a crawl one day and it took some time but I finally tracked it down to the File Browser taking 83% of my CPU. And that's a 1.8GHz with a gig of RAM.

[Jack W.]

Something that may help with browser speed for those who may not know:
When you open the browser, wait until it reads all the pics in the folder that you're browsing. When done, click "file" on the browser menu, then "export cache".
The next time you browse that same folder, it will be almost instantaneous.
Jack

[Longwatcher]

What Jack said,
Although I did not know about exporting the cache.

However, I hate waiting 2 hours for the browser to finish doing it's thing when a folder has several hundred pictures in it. DPP is way faster even though it too is a bit slow until it finishes the browser function.

until I started using DPP, I used to open the folder in PS CS and then go to sleep and then PS CS would work fine the next morning.

Then again that is probably what I get for taking 800 or more pictures per set.

[BoySpot]

You can set the browser to not work when other things are happening. That way, it compiles its data when the PC is free and waits when you are trying to do other things in Photoshop. Can't remember where this is located without looking at my copy at home, unfortauntely, but it shouldn't be hard to find in Preferences.

[tim]

PS CS file browser caches thumbnails automatically, the export cache feature is only if you want to put the cache on a CD or another drive. See this book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/032127878X/104-5217262-5940749) for details.

The PS CS file browser is pretty slow, but on a standard, modern, machine it's reasonably usable for me. There are definitely faster programs out there, I might consider doing my first pass in another program, but I like PS CS for RAW work. I have read a whole book on it though (link above) so I know pretty well how to use it. I tried CaptureOne and it wasn't for me.

One thing I learned yesterday is IrfanView (maybe spelled that wrong) has good CR2 support, and is MUCH faster than booting PS CS to view a single image :)