performance: caching the photo index to save time loading the app?

Discussion for Nokia Photo Browser

20-04-2009 22:01

It takes approximately 1-2 minutes to load my whole library of images (with grey boxes) every time i open the application, than another 2-3 for all the thumbnail images to load. than it takes another 2-5 seconds to load the hi-res image when it is focused.

So my questions are this... will there be any support in the future for:

1) caching the photo index so the entire application loads faster?
2) caching the thumbnails so there are less grey boxes when the application loads?
3) prioritizing the image processing so that rendering the selected image takes priority over anything else?

of course, there is always the problem of outdated information with caches... personally I feel that refreshing the cache is better than reloading the information every time the application loads... what do you guys think?

Comments

Submitted by nkaneko on 22-04-2009 12:42.

Thanks. Actually, it is implemented in the way almost exactly same as your idea. It should be only the first time that you get delay that spans for minutes to find files and generate thumbnails. Are you not getting any speed up on the loading from the second time launch?

Submitted by wikid24 on 22-04-2009 15:29.

Hi nkaneko,

Its actually working properly now, thanks.

I think now the problem that I was getting was some images were not loading at all, so when I closed the application, it would not save the cache information. it would still be running in the background and i'd have to forcibly close it via the task manager.

Ever since I removed the images from my phone that weren't loading on NPB, the application has been working great.

perhaps one enhancement would be when the user quits, save the cache as-is, regardless of if the cache contains 100% of the loaded images? or perhaps a prompt when the user quits, "the app. is still building a library index. continue running in the background?"

Submitted by droozel on 22-04-2009 20:20.

Very good idea about a prompt wikid24 ;)

Nokia E66-1 (04) / 210.21.007 / 27-02-2009 / RM-343

Submitted by nkaneko on 24-04-2009 10:48.

Thanks. We did some fix for the data base generation not stopping as exit.
We should be able to make that available in the next release.

As for providing prompts, our design choice has been to avoid them.
Our assumption is that most of our users don't care how it works internally.
For them, it can be rather frustrating to get questions that are neither understandable nor interesting.
On the other hand, advanced users would probably just guess what is happening and solve the stituation for themselves anyway -- like wikid24 did

Related topic is discussed in this thread
http://betalabs.nokia.com/forum/topic/1549