[digiKam-users] Digikam 7.2.0 - initial impressions and feedback

[Thomas D]

Hello,

I have been trying the new DK 7.2.0 release.

Wow. This looks really good!

I have a bit of feedback that I hope you will consider.

Status on face detection (and other long-running tasks)

I wanted to try the new face recognition so I am running detection on my collection.

It has now been running for about 3 days.

The only status of the operation is this progress bar in the bottom:

That is fine as an overview but does not give me much details. Luckily there is an option to expand this to see more details. (the up arrow).

Clicking the up arrow to see more details, I am presented with this:

Really just a bigger progress bar. No additional details are given.

What I would really like to see here are stuff like any or all of the following:

1: Estimated time left. I know this is likely really hard to estimate in any acurate way. 

2: Number of images already processed and number of images left.

Resource consumption / prioritization:

When didikam is running and doing the face detection my machine is almost unusable. All other applications respond very slowly. Digikam itself is almost completely unresponsive. For example if I just click an album it will be several seconds before DK shows the album. Or when viewing images in an album, when I click the arrow to see the next image, there will be a delay of several seconds before I see the next image.

I understand that face detection is time consuming and I have have allowed DK to utilize multiple CPU cores. 

I have a i7 CPU with 6 cores and 32 GB RAM. This is a random snapshot of the CPU utilization:

What I would really like to see here is a way set the priority of the background process doing the face detection to a lower priority than "Normal". 

Obviously, I could use Process Explorer to set the priority of Digikam to a low priority and that does indeed work such that other applications respond fast. However, still everything inside DK is extremely slow.

Another thing I would love here is a way to suspend a task temporarily. As mentioned above DK has been running for 3 days now. That is a really long time. 

I would like to be able to suspend/resume the face detection.

As it is, when I quit Digikam and start it again, I *think* that digikam resumes face detection where it left off. But I am not sure about that and I have no real way of knowing it from the UI. Informing the user that it is safe to quit digikam (if it is) would also be a nice improvement. 

When digikam starts up after quitting in an active task it would be nice if digikam suggests to resume it or just resumes it automatically. 

I hope you will consider the suggested improvements.

I would love to help implement this stuff but alas, I lack the skills to contribute code in a meaningful way.  However, I experience with UI/UX work and would love to contribute what I can here. Please let me know if you are interested in this.

Once again thanks for the fantastic work you do with digikam!

BR

Thomas

[PXOPHE]

Hi,

 

1/ Version 7.2.0 is indeed much faster.

2/ Some maintenance tasks take a lot of time, sometimes it is counted in seconds, sometimes in days, but the progress bar only shows a percentage of completion, ... of what? seconds or days?

3/ It would be very nice to have two buttons:

- one would allow you to close where you are; leave it at that; cancel the rest.

- the other one would allow to stop or pause the work temporarily, (to free the resources of the machine in order to do something else,) and then to resume.

4/ In the maintenance window, concerning the choices of albums/labels, it would be nice to be able to select, in a larger window, by recursively checking or unchecking by two or one click in the concerned box.

Here you go, please make good use of these wishes.

 

Best Regards.

Paul

 

 

De : Digikam-users [mailto:[hidden email]] De la part de Thomas D
Envoyé : mardi 30 mars 2021 12:05
À : digiKam - Home Manage your photographs as a professional with the power of open source
Objet : [digiKam-users] Digikam 7.2.0 - initial impressions and feedback

 

Hello,

 

I have been trying the new DK 7.2.0 release.

Wow. This looks really good!

 

I have a bit of feedback that I hope you will consider.

 

 

Status on face detection (and other long-running tasks)

I wanted to try the new face recognition so I am running detection on my collection.

It has now been running for about 3 days.

The only status of the operation is this progress bar in the bottom:

 

That is fine as an overview but does not give me much details. Luckily there is an option to expand this to see more details. (the up arrow).

Clicking the up arrow to see more details, I am presented with this:

 

 

Really just a bigger progress bar. No additional details are given.

What I would really like to see here are stuff like any or all of the following:

 

1: Estimated time left. I know this is likely really hard to estimate in any acurate way. 

 

2: Number of images already processed and number of images left.

 

 

Resource consumption / prioritization:

When didikam is running and doing the face detection my machine is almost unusable. All other applications respond very slowly. Digikam itself is almost completely unresponsive. For example if I just click an album it will be several seconds before DK shows the album. Or when viewing images in an album, when I click the arrow to see the next image, there will be a delay of several seconds before I see the next image.

I understand that face detection is time consuming and I have have allowed DK to utilize multiple CPU cores. 

I have a i7 CPU with 6 cores and 32 GB RAM. This is a random snapshot of the CPU utilization:

 

 

What I would really like to see here is a way set the priority of the background process doing the face detection to a lower priority than "Normal". 

Obviously, I could use Process Explorer to set the priority of Digikam to a low priority and that does indeed work such that other applications respond fast. However, still everything inside DK is extremely slow.

 

Another thing I would love here is a way to suspend a task temporarily. As mentioned above DK has been running for 3 days now. That is a really long time. 

I would like to be able to suspend/resume the face detection.

 

As it is, when I quit Digikam and start it again, I *think* that digikam resumes face detection where it left off. But I am not sure about that and I have no real way of knowing it from the UI. Informing the user that it is safe to quit digikam (if it is) would also be a nice improvement. 

When digikam starts up after quitting in an active task it would be nice if digikam suggests to resume it or just resumes it automatically. 

 

 

I hope you will consider the suggested improvements.

I would love to help implement this stuff but alas, I lack the skills to contribute code in a meaningful way.  However, I experience with UI/UX work and would love to contribute what I can here. Please let me know if you are interested in this.

 

Once again thanks for the fantastic work you do with digikam!

 

BR

Thomas

[PackElend]

my IT (network, server, workstation) and  is being overhauled, I'm currently using only my office machine, so I can not verfiy by myself.

Can you tell if 386291 – lazy synchronization (kde.org) is working now? 

Lazy synchronization (Settings - Metadata - Behavior tab)
It is supposed that digikam won't sync until you click on the sync icon in the bottom bar. Digikam is also supposed to sync when you close it. 

Does it work in the entire face detection and recognition workflow as well, as I struggled with 

Selecting the proper name causes the selected thumbnails to disappear, then reappear, then disappear (one at a time) as they’re processed. This shifts the remaining thumbnails around, making it difficult to multiselect another set of faces without error. I would prefer that faces “in process” simply stay hidden after selecting the name, and only appears again in the appropriate category (either “Confirmed” or in the proper People tag). This way I could continue “queueing up” new faces to process while KD works on the others.

as described in  digikam-users - [digiKam-users] 7.2 (beta) Face detection feedback (nabble.com) 

thank you 

Le mar. 30 mars 2021 à 14:06, Paul CHRISTOPHE <[hidden email]> a écrit :

Hi,

 

1/ Version 7.2.0 is indeed much faster.

2/ Some maintenance tasks take a lot of time, sometimes it is counted in seconds, sometimes in days, but the progress bar only shows a percentage of completion, ... of what? seconds or days?

3/ It would be very nice to have two buttons:

- one would allow you to close where you are; leave it at that; cancel the rest.

- the other one would allow to stop or pause the work temporarily, (to free the resources of the machine in order to do something else,) and then to resume.

4/ In the maintenance window, concerning the choices of albums/labels, it would be nice to be able to select, in a larger window, by recursively checking or unchecking by two or one click in the concerned box.

Here you go, please make good use of these wishes.

 

Best Regards.

Paul

 

 

De : Digikam-users [mailto:[hidden email]] De la part de Thomas D
Envoyé : mardi 30 mars 2021 12:05
À : digiKam - Home Manage your photographs as a professional with the power of open source
Objet : [digiKam-users] Digikam 7.2.0 - initial impressions and feedback

 

Hello,

 

I have been trying the new DK 7.2.0 release.

Wow. This looks really good!

 

I have a bit of feedback that I hope you will consider.

 

 

Status on face detection (and other long-running tasks)

I wanted to try the new face recognition so I am running detection on my collection.

It has now been running for about 3 days.

The only status of the operation is this progress bar in the bottom:

 

That is fine as an overview but does not give me much details. Luckily there is an option to expand this to see more details. (the up arrow).

Clicking the up arrow to see more details, I am presented with this:

 

 

Really just a bigger progress bar. No additional details are given.

What I would really like to see here are stuff like any or all of the following:

 

1: Estimated time left. I know this is likely really hard to estimate in any acurate way. 

 

2: Number of images already processed and number of images left.

 

 

Resource consumption / prioritization:

When didikam is running and doing the face detection my machine is almost unusable. All other applications respond very slowly. Digikam itself is almost completely unresponsive. For example if I just click an album it will be several seconds before DK shows the album. Or when viewing images in an album, when I click the arrow to see the next image, there will be a delay of several seconds before I see the next image.

I understand that face detection is time consuming and I have have allowed DK to utilize multiple CPU cores. 

I have a i7 CPU with 6 cores and 32 GB RAM. This is a random snapshot of the CPU utilization:

 

 

What I would really like to see here is a way set the priority of the background process doing the face detection to a lower priority than "Normal". 

Obviously, I could use Process Explorer to set the priority of Digikam to a low priority and that does indeed work such that other applications respond fast. However, still everything inside DK is extremely slow.

 

Another thing I would love here is a way to suspend a task temporarily. As mentioned above DK has been running for 3 days now. That is a really long time. 

I would like to be able to suspend/resume the face detection.

 

As it is, when I quit Digikam and start it again, I *think* that digikam resumes face detection where it left off. But I am not sure about that and I have no real way of knowing it from the UI. Informing the user that it is safe to quit digikam (if it is) would also be a nice improvement. 

When digikam starts up after quitting in an active task it would be nice if digikam suggests to resume it or just resumes it automatically. 

 

 

I hope you will consider the suggested improvements.

I would love to help implement this stuff but alas, I lack the skills to contribute code in a meaningful way.  However, I experience with UI/UX work and would love to contribute what I can here. Please let me know if you are interested in this.

 

Once again thanks for the fantastic work you do with digikam!

 

BR

Thomas

[Gilles Caulier-4]

Le mar. 30 mars 2021 à 08:06, Paul CHRISTOPHE <[hidden email]> a écrit :

Hi,

 

1/ Version 7.2.0 is indeed much faster.

2/ Some maintenance tasks take a lot of time, sometimes it is counted in seconds, sometimes in days, but the progress bar only shows a percentage of completion, ... of what? seconds or days?

Number of files to process of course. There is no estimation of time to process whole faces, this depends of too many parameters, as image contents, image size, image extraction, etc...

Gilles Caulier

 

3/ It would be very nice to have two buttons:

- one would allow you to close where you are; leave it at that; cancel the rest.

- the other one would allow to stop or pause the work temporarily, (to free the resources of the machine in order to do something else,) and then to resume.

4/ In the maintenance window, concerning the choices of albums/labels, it would be nice to be able to select, in a larger window, by recursively checking or unchecking by two or one click in the concerned box.

Here you go, please make good use of these wishes.

 

For all wishes, please :

Go to digiKam bugzilla / faces workflow | engine | detection | recognition, check existing files, look if the topic already exists and add new comments. If no entry exists, well create a new one.

Remember that time to life of thread in mailing is short and difficult to archive and follow. It's the role of bugzilla. In contrast,  for all technicals Q, a mailing list is more appropriate.

Best Regards

Gilles Caulier