Very sloooow to import images

[ski542002]

What am I doing incorrectly? New to PS, started using earlier this week.

When I import images into a catalog, I'm only importing references to the catalog, (not doing a copy). The originals always reside on my external backup drive. I found I can only import one project folder of images at a time. IF I select more than one folder, the app eventually crashes not finishing the image import. Then I need to relaunch PS.

For instance, even importing one folder containing 18 tiffs (large, as in 180mb @) the import is still churning after an hour, still only at 47% completed. I'm trying to set up an archive of images for easy reference, some dating back to 2011. It will take me a year of Sunday's to even get close to my goal.

I'm running a 2024 M-4 Mac mini, which is the fastest Mac I've ever owned. In the past I used an app that was not updated by the developer. I like PS, but this other app was super fast, using the same "reference file" protocol, not image copying.

[Hert]

If you have a virus scanner installed then make sure to exclude the catalog folder.

[G8DHE]

How fast is the external drive ? If your writing back the metadata to the images then it might well be very slow as its first had to read the image then update and write it back to the image as well as store it locally in the database.

[ski542002]

The virus app is not applicable. The drive is NOT an ssd because I use it for long term archiving. Just cheap, big storage capacity. It's a Glyph BlackBox Pro External Hard Drive 7200 RPM, USB-C (3.1,Gen2) (8TB). Read speed is 250 mbps.

I have plenty of SSD's and will experiment on the difference in speed. I know the ssd's are lots faster than a 7200 rpm spindle drive.

[Hert]

It is recommended that you keep the Catalog files on the fastest drive available. Typically that would be an internal SSD drive.
The external drive is well suited to use as a store for your image files, more so after the thumbs are generated.

An average (not top-notch) SSD is about 20x faster than a 7200 HDD drive.
Here's a comparison create by ChatGPT:

DriveComparison.png (84.74 KiB) Viewed 7915 times

A database operation that takes 20 second to complete on a 7200HDD will take 1 second on a PCIe-3 SSD
A database operation that takes 20 seconds to complete on a 7200HDD will take half a second on a PCIe-4 SSD
A database operation that takes 20 seconds to complete on a 7200HDD will take a quarter of a second on a PCIe-5 SSD

Those differences are huge. Photo Supreme is all about database operations and so it benefits hugely from keeping the catalog files stored on a faster drive.