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

Posted by Thomas D on Mar 30, 2021; 10:04am
URL: http://digikam.185.s1.nabble.com/digiKam-users-Digikam-7-2-0-initial-impressions-and-feedback-tp4715626.html

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