Hi,
some tips regarding display performance:
In IMatch you can view images in the slide show, or in the "Preview" window on the left. When you switch to the preview window, and then navigate among the thumbnails on the right, IMatch waits for about 1/2 second before it loads the image into the preview.
This allows the users who prefer to work with the keyboard during the intial culling process after a shooting or while sitting with a client to freely navigate without waiting for the preview view.
But since you see all the thumbnails, you can directly jump to an image by just clicking on it.
Tip: Use rather large (e.g. 300x300 pixel) thumbnails for your database, and then configure one of the level-of-detail modes to show the thumbnails at 100%. Having 300x300 previews of a folder is pretty good and usually allows to find an image real fast.
Tip: You can use the blue arrow button on the left of the toolbar to hide all secondary windows so you see only the thumbnails. Even you use very large tumbnails, you should get 3x2 or 4x4 á 300 pixel on a screen.
By switching to another log mode with smaller thumbnails you can immediately view about 50, 80, 100 or more thumbnails at once, which is a big help when you work with folders with hundreds of files.
Even for a folder with thousands of images, the thumbnail window scrolls as fast as you can scroll the mouse or more the scroll bar. If not, make sure that your virus checker does not constantly scan the IMatch database files. This happens quite often and the effects are dramatic.
The performance of the preview window on the left (Ctrl+4) and the slide show (Ctrl+F12) depends on several factors, including things like color management (costs about 300% performance), if you use dynamic display sharpen or things like high-quality resampling in fit-to-screen mode.
If you don't apply a color-managed workflow or you don't care for color accuracy, turning these features off will boost the performance a lot while viewing your images. To get a display performance, color accuracy and image quality comparable to ACDSee, turn all these advanced options off in IMatch.
If you work with RAW files, enabling the off-line caching will allow IMatch to cache previews of your images on disk, which is several times faster than loading the RAW image each time you click on a thumbnail. Even for large 16 MP images the display time drops down to a second or so.
But this will of course require more disk space, which may be a problem if you have more than 100,000 or 150,000 images managed in IMatch. Hence IMatch gives you full control over which images to cache, which size and quality you want. On a per-folder level. Other applications just do that, in the background. In IMatch you have the choice.
What often slows things down is displaying metadata information. IMatch may have to extract and parse the IPTC and EXIF data embedded in your images when you show this information below the thumbnails or in the property window (EXIF, IPTC oder User tabs).
Extracting EXIF data or IPTC data from an image and making sense of all the information can take longer than loading the actual image data - especially when your image file format uses EXIF maker notes or proprietary metadata fields.
For better performance, please use the cached XMP metadata to define what you see below the thumbnails and in the property windows. IMatch keeps copies of this data inside the database, and must not access the original image to retrieve the information every time you display it.
For faster navigation in the slide show, make sure you enable the film strip window ('S' key). Here you can scroll almost instantly even when you view hundreds of images in the slide show. You can toggle the film strip window to show below or on the right so it won't interfere with your image display (Press 'S' several times).
The info window in the slide show ('I' key) also allows you to display customized information gathered from EXIF and IPTC and XMP. Here again IMatch will access the original data in the file when you display EXIF and IPTC information (may take a second or more to extract that information). Use XMP variables in the info window template and also the tooltip templates for best performance.
Of course you can also turn all these features off to gain more speed. For most users 1 image per second is fast enough for culling and viewing, though. IMatch caches images shown in the slide show, so going back is instant. IMatch does preload the next image(s) in sequence in the slide show, but reading the pixels, doing proper resampling, color management, metadata extraction can take some time.
If you work only with JPEG files and have no color managed workflow, ACDSee is still the fastest program around for viewing this file format. Especially the normal version without color management is very fast when rendering JPEG files. But IMatch comes real close.
-- Mario M. Westphal - Author of IMatch
photools.com - Digital Image Management Solutions
[email protected]
http://www.photools.com
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