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The Processing… Processing… Problem

PhotoJoseph's picture
July 4, 2011 - 1:40pm

Endless thumbnail redraw

Have you ever encountered a situation where if you go into an older project that you haven’t been in for a while, you notice that the thumbnails aren’t quite ready, and even though they draw reasonably quickly, Aperture as a whole seems to slow down for a while?

If you have encountered this, have you opened up the Activity Window (from the menu Window > Show Activity, or by clicking on the spinner under the Viewer) — always the way to see what’s going on in the background — only to see a long list of queued “processing” activities, like this?

This is something I’ve been battling for a long, long time. It’s always older projects; ones I haven’t been into in ages. And because I often am looking around for a particular photo, I tend to go through many, many old projects in a single sitting. And these queued “processing” activities have been a real drag on my workflow.

If I sat and waited, they would eventually finish. But the more projects I went into, and the more I scrolled within those projects, the more these mysterious activities would pile up.

The wrong solution

Because it seemed thumbnail related, I have used the command Photos > Generate Thumbnails on the entire library (going to the Photos view, selecting all images, and running the command) in hopes of forcing a refresh of all thumbnails, and of course hoping that would solve the issue. It never worked, and the command took overnight (at least!) to run on my very large library.

Needless to say, this never made a difference.

A unique approach

Then at some point, it occurred to me that if I could just scroll through the entire library, and let all these mystery activities queue up — and finish! — then maybe my problem would be solved. And there’s an easy way to do this; in any thumbnail view in Aperture, if you tap the J, K, and L keys, they do the same thing that JKL do in a video editor. J moves backwards, K stops, and L moves forward. If you tap L again, it moves faster. What this means is you can set Aperture to automatically scroll your entire library with a single keystroke.

So, I set off to do this. I selected the Photos view, and ensured that the search window was Showing All. I hid the Inspector (I key) and switched to Browser view (thumbnails only). I then made the thumbnails as big as possible, so that scrolling would take as long as possible (I knew from experience that Aperture would start to choke as this list got longer), tapped the L key to start scrolling, and went to bed.

The following morning, about a gazillion “processing” items were in my Activities monitor, and I wasn’t very far through my library (maybe 1/3 through at best). I selected all items in the queue and hit the Cancel Task button. This in itself took quite some time, as Aperture was moving at an absolute snail’s pace by now. Once all were cancelled, Aperture returned to normal. But of course, I wasn’t finished.

The following night, I did it again—but again starting from the top. The next morning, Aperture was doing the same thing, but it was farther along in my list. Good; progress.

Over and over I did this. I didn’t get to it every night, so it was probably well over a week before I finished. But one morning, I woke up to see the last photo in my collection in the Browser, and zero activity in the monitor.

Success?

That was about two weeks ago. I haven’t been using Aperture a lot since then, but when I have, I’ve been paying close attention to the Activity window, and I haven’t once seen the dreaded “processing” queuing up. My library feels dramatically faster as I switch projects now. It’s a significant difference!

It may be too soon to tell if the problem truly is gone, but I felt it was time to report my experience.

Why did this work?

As far as I can guess, there’s some other kind of activity that has to happen to draw the image to screen that isn’t included in thumbnail generation. My library is old. It’s been through every version of Aperture, and a LOT of changes. If your library is reasonably new or small, you probably haven’t seen this. But I’m very curious to know if anyone else has seen this, and more importantly, if this problem can be solved for you with this trick, too.

Please let me know in the comments if you’ve seen this, and if you have, give this “solution” a try and let us know if it helped!!

PS—don’t forget the sale!

If you’re reading this before the end of the 4th of July U.S. holiday weekend, you’re not too late to take advantage of my store-wide 20% off sale! Just enter the code fireworks2011 on checkout and you’ll get 20% off everything—including my new “Work Like a Pro Photographer in Aperture 3” video series by Video2Brain.

A user on Twitter asked me to explain the difference between this new video and my ongoing Live Training. It’s a great question, and I explained on Twitter, but I’ll also answer the question on here in the morning. If you’re wondering that yourself, be sure to check back here.

App:
Apple Aperture
Platform:
macOS
Author:
PhotoJoseph

Joseph,

I’m not seeing this now, but I was seeing it when Aperture 3 was new (i.e. ver 3.0). I just figured it was a bug that got fixed. Maybe not.

Thomas

Thanks for the JKL tip :)

I haven’t noticed this processing thingy myself, that you speak of, so I just tried to scroll through my 18,000 shots (imported into the 1st release of Aperture via my iPhoto library) and only two photos had their thumbnail redone, according to the activity monitor -so that’s not too bad.

Hi Joseph

Likewise on the JKL tip. Good one. I was working on a sideshow yesterday and could not work out how to easily bring the focus back to the first slide … JKL works well.

Just curious, but would not one of the three data base remedies described under “Repairing and Rebuilding Your Aperture Library” in Chapter 26 of the A3 User Guide bring your library responsiveness up to scratch without the need for two weeks of angst? Like Klaus, I scrolled through a portion of my 56k images until I got bored playing with JKL, and never saw anything on the activity monitor (lots of disk action though).

Joseph,

I’m curious to know the answer to the question of “Work Like a Pro” vs. “Live Training.” I searched through your recent tweets, but couldn’t find an answer. I’m poised to buy and take advantage of the sale but don’t want to duplicate if I don’t have to.

Thanks and happy 4th!

Kathryn

Thomas, Kalus — glad to hear you aren’t having the problems.

Klaus, Steve — glad you like the JKL tip. I use it a surprising amount just to sit back and scroll through, looking for a photo I want to use.

Steve — Nope, believe me, I’ve tried those repairs and have run them all various times for various reasons. This is an issue that has persisted.

Kathryn — I’m writing it now! ;-)

-Joseph @ApertureExpert

@PhotoJoseph
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Hi Joseph,

Just to let you know I did take advantage of your discount for “Work Like a Pro” yesterday. Even though I have used Aperture for a number of years, it is always nice to see if I am missing anything or learn something new. I must admit that the software used to produce these videos online is great. I assume it is in flash since I could not get it to work on my iPad 2? Did down load to install on my MacBook Pro. Very easy to use once I got the hang of it.

You have a lot of good information that is easy to follow. Like I mentioned I have been using Aperture for a while, however I feel anyone who maybe new to Aperture should find this most helpful.

On another note I am still using the Nitro Firewire 800 port attached to my current MacBook Pro. Just added a G/Raid 2TB drive from G-Technology to use as my main storage for the Aperture library. The drive works great via the Nitro.

Best,

Stu

Stu,

Thanks, I appreciate that! Glad to hear you’ve been able to benefit from the training.

I’m still using my Nitro as well, but oddly enough last time I had it connected (I’ve been moving around, getting ready to finally set up a permanent office again) it started giving me all the problems that I bought it to get rid of! But, will settle in and cable it up and see if it goes back to behaving.

-Joseph @ApertureExpert

@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?

I note that post install of the new A3 update (to v3.1.3), the whole A3 library cops an update “Updating library … n of n” (which takes a while). I wonder if that has any impact on your “processing… processing…” issue Joseph?

Steve,

Interesting… I just installed the update, and didn’t get any “updating library” message for any duration of time. In fact, the only dialog I saw was the standard opening library dialog, except that it said “update of library complete”. And this is one big library!!

-Joseph @ApertureExpert

@PhotoJoseph
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