Digital Photo Professional incredibly slow

[gecastro]

Does anyone else have the problem that with more than 500 photos in the folder, DPP becomes almost unusable? I recently upgraded to the latest version, 4.19.10, and it seems even slower than the previous version.

[Waddizzle]

“ Hi, I want to share my solution that works already for years. DPP uses a sort of filesystem watcher that tracks the changes on disk so newly created folders (after importing new pictures) etc. are directly visible on screen. My Pictures folder has a lot subfolders (1 per shooting day), this is what slows down the application. “

You are correct about the potential for many subfolders. My solution was to change the default startup folder to a folder in my root directory. 

I only used the folder for downloads and editing.  Once I was done editing, I would move the files elsewhere. My strategy was to minimize the number of files DPP could see at any given time. 

[March411]

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@Waddizzle wrote:

My solution was to change the default startup folder to a folder in my root directory. 

I only used the folder for downloads and editing.  Once I was done editing, I would move the files elsewhere. My strategy was to minimize the number of files DPP could see at any given time. 

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+1 and it really speeds up the load time of images I am reviewing and culling.

[wq9nsc]

One of Windows many annoyances is the defaults it wants to use for file locations and worse is sometimes one of its frequent updates will reset your choice to Windows defaults.  And Windows file management is horrible, its bloated search system/updater in particular.

I have a DPP image file folder on one of the processor bus SSDs on my workstation and events are put into that folder as sub-directories by date.  Once I have finished processing, the RAW files get mirrored on an 8 TB regular "mechanical" drive in the PC and once a week the RAW files from the SSD get moved to pairs of 20 TB external mirrored drives which provide long-term backup at which point they get removed from both internal drives.  Once the files are temporarily on the processing SSD and the internal 8TB drive, I feel safe in removing the files from the camera cards.

I have been fortunate not to experience issues with a SS or regular drive but they are far from 100% reliable which is why I keep dual backups of important files and one set is kept in my university office.  I have spent a few days looking at different enterprise grade drives for the new system I have on order and the bottom line is they all fail and some at a very young age so dual backups are important.  The drives I use have "health" indicators and I have done one replacement of a pair of 1 TB SAS bus drives in my HP Z840 that were down to the 50% health range.

Rodger

[23W]

This app doesn't use GPU and use only 1 core of CPU ... It's really incredibly slow. Not professional at all

[SignifDigits]

I use the local SSD and copy to my NAS.  I CAN use from the NAS, but the speedup and reliability of working from the local SSD is worth the extra workflow step to me.   And there are less "moving parts" in the technology chain as well, so I lower my risk of having a problem like you are having.   You can read about my journey at https://community.usa.canon.com/t5/Camera-Software/Canon-DPP-only-works-with-WIFI-OFF-on-Asus-ProArt...

My issue was largely due to improper setting ins File and Print Sharing (and technically mine is a local cloud built on a NAS and there is another OS involved on the other end, but gray versus grey to some extent).  I'm very happy with the performance now on my Asus ProArt laptop.  I back up local SSD to a 2TB SSD drive (especially useful when on travel without NAS access) and also to my NAS, and my NAS is sextuple redundant (3 NAS devices each RAID 1) with nightly incremental backups - one located in a separate outbuilding.  Overkill.  But I've lost data in the past and wish to never have that happen again.

I'm not a professional so time isn't money to me, but even if I were the faster response time of even Quick Review culling through 500 images would be worth it to me.

[wq9nsc]

I am not familiar with how it behaves on Apple hardware but in Windows it should be using multiple cores.  I agree that it doesn't properly use GPU resources.

These are a pair of task manager screenshots showing core utilization of my HP workstation (twin 28 core Xeon CPUs so the 56 cores are displayed by Windows as 112 logical cores in task manager).  

DPP does use multiple cores but it doesn't take full advantage of available resources.  

The first image is with DPP doing nothing after loading a directory of over 800 files, the second is when I told it to batch process 100 of them into JPG.

Rodger

DPP doing nothingDPP batch processing to JPG

[SignifDigits]

Nearly all Windows 11 apps are going to be multithreaded these days as the OS and CPUs are designed to implicitly do multithreading vs the "old days" taking advantage of multiple cores required explicit multithreading.  So DPP4 is multithreaded and uses all cores.  

If you're running Windows 10 on a 5-year old computer with HDDs, etc. you are likely to find DPP slow.  If you're running Windows 11, SSD, 16GB fast memory (8GB min, despite the official 4GB min listed), a more recent i7 architecture (or AMD, even though technically, AMD isn't "recommended"), running files on your local disk and having significant performance issues, then there might be something amiss.

I abandoned DPP for LightRoom about 6 or 7 so years ago as DPP was nearly unusable on the  Windows HW and SW I had then and WAS unusable using NAS-based files.  I switched back about 4 or 5 years ago with newer HW and OS on local SSD storage and have no significant performance complaints.  Would I like the functions like area processing, spot/stamp and denoise to speed up via using GPU processing and faster refresh times via GPU utilization?  Yes, yes, I would.  But for a freely distributed package I feel thankful to Canon to have it and it's capabilities..