Photos (Windows 10) – huge resource sucker & cure

[Ed P]

Many people find the new Photos app sucks up all available cpu capacity. If this is a problem for you try the remedies posted here:

TenForums Link

[Richard]

What is ‘Photos’ supposed to do? Prompted by your prod I had a look. I am not sure I have bothered before, it appears that it wants to find every image on the computer and do something to present them in its own way. With a number of tens of thousands and more on the network, it could clearly be going to take some time. After several minutes of disk activity, (there are 4 one SSD and three spinning rust, so several disks it could play with), I gave it up as pointless and cancelled.

[The Duke]

My photos go off my camera, quick look detect the majority save the good ones to Google photos, Flickr, skydive and mega.

If I have some real nice ones I’ll back them up with the raw files to an hdd and pen drive . I don’t keep any pictures on my pc’s. Google photos is by far the best/simplest way to organise and share. Plus you always have access to your pics if your at a relatives.

I cba messing in windows to order my photos etc. Back in the day I’d use picasa which was great. Not sure that still exists, but no real need for it myself anymore.

[Richard]

My ‘collection’ stretches back to the 1960s, many have been scanned and painstakingly digitally retouched to recover lost colours and cleaned to remove spots and scratches. –  I hate the way TV programmes just scan and use spotty images. My scanned images are often quite large, perhaps that caused ‘Photos’ to stumble, but recent efforts have focussed on short term items. e.g. work in progress, or this is what I want and the suchlike. I should go through and cull those once they have had their day.

[Ed P]

The basic raison d’etre of Photos is to classify all your stuff and group subjects (it does facial recognition) in similar ways to Google et al. Because it does all this and keeps trying to refine its learning, if you have large folders of Photos it consumes massive amounts of resources for long periods of time.

I hate it!

[Tippon]

Ed P wrote:

Many people find the new Photos app sucks up all available cpu capacity. If this is a problem for you try the remedies posted here: TenForums Link

Thanks Ed 🙂

Hopefully it will cure my father’s old problem from here:

https://forumite.co.uk/forums/topic/sudden-video-problems/

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Why do so many apps insist on trying to be Media managers these days ?

I first noticed this annoying trend about 15 years ago when I finally replaced Adobe Photo Deluxe Pro with Photoshop Elements and it wanted to catalogue my “Media Collection” before it would let me do any editing.

Sometimes I just want a program to do what it says it does as quickly as possible. I used to use the picassa photo viewer to quickly look at my pictures but now Google has dropped support for that in favour of an even more bloated than before Google Drive.

[Richard]

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

Why do so many apps insist on trying to be Media managers these days ? I first noticed this annoying trend about 15 years ago when I finally replaced Adobe Photo Deluxe Pro with Photoshop Elements and it wanted to catalogue my “Media Collection” before it would let me do any editing. Sometimes I just want a program to do what it says it does as quickly as possible. I used to use the picassa photo viewer to quickly look at my pictures but now Google has dropped support for that in favour of an even more bloated than before Google Drive.

I totally agree, I abandon them before they get anywhere.

[Drezha]

I’ve found XNView to be a reasonable alternative to Picasa, as I was disappointed when that disappered – partly because the built in quick image editor for explorer was great and much better than the Windows 10 in built photo previewer.

I’ve looked into Apple’s Photo app for my Mac, but I’m loathe to pay for the increase in iCloud storage that putting all my photos in it would entail and XNView also seems to cover some of the uses that I would need.

I don’t mind the media managers to much, it’s when they make it difficult to find the actual files themselves and therefore allowing me to backup nicely. I use Calibre for my eBooks and Zotero for my academic papers and technical standards and they organise items for me in their own way – initially this was a bit of a pain, but I’m sold on it for these, as I can log in and find the files in Explorer if needed easily enough. However, Photos for the Mac hides all the images in various sub folders etc. All nicely backed up using Time Machine, but I believe it uses hard links and soft links, which means that I can’t sync it nicely using my Synology.

However, the Synology Photo Station is quite good as well – I should play with that a bit more as well.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I have looked more deeply at how Windows organises Media files these days and now I have a headache !

I have always known that the library folders shown in file explorer are just some sort of link to real folders containing the files (the default is folders such as My Pictures as used in older versions of Windows for compatability reasons) but it appears to go deeper than that.

From what I can find on the internet  the library directories also contain information about the files they hold that they get from the Windows indexing service and it may be held in Alternate Data Streams.

Anyway, apparently the build in Universal Windows Platform apps like Photos use the information in new ways that may kick off indexing as soon as you open them.

If anyone knows more or better please let me know ?

[Richard]

That sound entirely reasonable and could account for the watch hell freeze over time it takes.

I hate the really stupid way that the file browser miss-operates. You open it up, try to find what you want on the ‘X;’ drive and the stupid thing send you back to where you don’t want to be, forcing you to scroll down a second time. The time lost while it goes nowhere is a really stupid farce. I saw an account of the reactivation project for the old file manager, it cannot be worse than the failure in Windows 10, but it was not clear how easy it would be to compile it to a working executable. I have not compiled anything for a good many years probably back in the late 1980s or very early 90s.

I do not want hopelessly slow and totally pointless libraries, I want files, and preferably the right file(s).

[The Duke]

I always ignored libraries in Windows. I think they come on with 7, maybe even vista. I just never bothered with them.

Windows search has always seemed broken. Though I’ve not tried it works a while. A long while.

Google’s drive search is brilliant. But they get to use the power of Google to index all your stuff, I suppose ms only has the power of your PC, with Windows search.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

As I understand it the Microsoft programing guide lines now state that all Universal apps, like those in the Windows app store, should use the library as the default save location. Not that I use any apps from the app store but MS seem serious about forcing Windows libraries into greater use.

[Richard]

Why use an ‘ape’ to do what you can do better yourself. I have nothing from the tumble Weed-Park, sorry MS Store, it needs an MS log in and is a waste of money venture.

Libraries or whatever sound and are crap.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Its all linked in with windows search too im afraid which is actually the replacement for the old indexing service .

Anyone feeling brave can follow the link but its heavy going.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa965362(v=vs.85).aspx

[Author]

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