Hi, I opened digikam the first time, I choose an image folder with about 20.000 images and went through the initial setup. The splash screen showed some progress and then it seemed to be stuck at "Loading tools...". I wondered why the tool loading might take so long. I killed digikam and started it from the console where I got this for each image in the folder: ... digikam.dimg: "/home/user1/bilder/2015/SAM_1094.JPG" : JPEG file identified digikam.database: Adding new item "/home/user1/bilder/2015//SAM_1094.JPG" digikam.metaengine: DateTime => Exif.Photo.DateTimeOriginal => QDateTime(2015-10-09 16:59:25.000 CEST Qt::TimeSpec(LocalTime)) digikam.metaengine: DateTime (Exif digitalized): Fr. Okt. 9 16:59:25 2015 digikam.metaengine: Orientation => Exif.Image.Orientation => 1 digikam.database: Scanning took 6 ms ... The scan took 222 seconds in total. So over 3 minutes. Maybe instead of "Loading tools..." one could display "Scanning images...".
I can confirm this. The splash window shows "Loading tools ..." while actually scanning the image folder as gets visible when starting digikam in a terminal window.
Git commit 7a6f20c750d4e8c12353748d1febb38964b630d8 by Maik Qualmann. Committed on 15/03/2016 at 11:27. Pushed by mqualmann into branch 'master'. add "Search for new items..." message FIXED-IN: 5.0.0 M +2 -3 NEWS M +5 -0 app/main/digikamapp.cpp http://commits.kde.org/digikam/7a6f20c750d4e8c12353748d1febb38964b630d8
Cool, thanks for the quick fix. Another observation: if I click on the splash screen it disappears but digikam is still operating invisibly in the background. This might be intended but if the startup operation takes long time, one might think digikam is not running anymore which is false.
yes this is the current behavior. Ideally, only the DB interface initialisation must be present in splash. Currently we have too an album listing parse (not the album contents). The album contents is delayed in progress manager when main GUI is show. Gilles Caulier
Sorry for commenting the closed bug: @Gilles: So, do I understand correctly that the initial scanning of albums actually scans the directories only? After boot, it takes some time before GUI is shown (1379 dirs, up to one minute). Next start of digiKam is almost immediate, I assume that the dirs are cached by the kernel already. It probably depends on HDD and filesystem type, but yet, it would be good if this directory parsing can be postponed to a later stage - the initial album list can be taken from the database and it could be updated on the fly after the directory structure is read.
The way to scan new image is delegate after than GUI is loaded. Also scan for new item at startup option is back in Setup dialog. See all these changes in 5.1.0 release