Ok, first time I tried contact sheet II, it was extremely slow. At the time, I was trying to generate a contact sheet from files over the network, and suspected that, however it wasn't running the network interface at anywhere near to capacity. I aborted photoshop after a while.

Next, I tried it on c:\windows\temp which currently contains 206 files, it was slow, but did eventually finish.

Now, in my third attempt to use it, for a serious need this time, I opened Contact Sheet II, (which was still pointed at c:\windows\temp, which still has 206 approx 6mb images; it was hour glass for several minutes (presumably scanning the 206 images?) before I could do anything), changed the options, which was also very slow; for instance, changing the sheet size for 8x10.5 to 15x10, there was probably a good 10 seconds between keystrokes/mouse presses/etc being recognized.

I then changed the directory location to e:\ (my DVD drive) with a DVD that has approx 8000 images on it, and its been hour-glass pointer now for about 3 hours (immediately after browsing to the new directory, I haven't clicked/been able to click the contact sheet's main OK button yet, and it hasn't updated how many total images/contact sheets area of the dialog yet). The DVD drive makes occasional noises briefly once every half hour or so (once just now while typing the previous paragraph). windows task manager shows: Photoshop.exe cpu 88 mem usage 73,608K VM size 100,952K. The cpu usage for photoshop generally bouncing around in the low 80s. System idle is anywhere from 20 to 0%, usually closer to 0.

It just accessed the DVD drive again, and system idle bounced to 74% while the drive was accessed.

Photoshop appears to be hung, but I don't think it is, nothing else has any reason to access the drive, which as I said wakes up very occasionally, its just very non-responsive, and its not updating its windows. Contact sheet II is the first and only thing I opened after this launch of photoshop. I suspect if I leave it all night, and check in the morning, it might have recovered, although if I have to extrapolate from how long it takes for the 206 images in the temp dir, to the 8000 on the DVD, i'm not sure all night will be long enough.

This is on WinXP home with all windows updates to date applied. Most of the images on the DVD are 1600x1200, or 21xx by 16xx, jpegs approx 300k to 800k in size.

Is this a general problem with contact sheet, or is it just me, and if so, what can I do about it. Photoshop in general otherwise appears to run fine. I think the current preference for memory usage is 65 or 70%. I have 1 gig in my machine, and nearly 3 gig free on the photoshop scratch drive. its a 2.6ghz p4. If contact sheet doesn't work for large numbers of images, that would seem to defeat the purpose.

Could this be the same windows API problem that slows photoshop CS loading? (although this situation with contact sheet is really, really slow, beyond usable).

Dave_E_Martin

Replied in the following topics

contact sheet II very slow?