SUMMARY When launching Gwenview for the first time in a session, it takes a very long time to load images, particularly if the drive is not the boot drive. This happens regardless of which drive or folder I open, but after the first launch of Gwenview things are significantly faster. There is still a 5-ish second loading process. The loading process causes Gwenview to be very unresponsive, so there is a lot of delay when zooming into images initiating actions such as a crop, etc. I was in the process of making another report and was using Gwenview to open some screenshots for comparison, and it took several minutes before everything fully loaded and I could get into using Gwenview. Once the number at the bottom of the screen actually represented the number of images in that folder and so had fully loaded it, things were smooth. This happens across SATA SSDs and m.2 NVMe SSDs, and also happened when I had an internal HDD which is no longer connected. After this period, while it still takes Gwenview some 5-ish seconds, it's much faster than several minutes on the first boot. I have been able to reproduce similar behaviour on a separate device, although it is much faster (less than a minute) it still takes time for Gwenview to "warm up" on a first boot. Perhaps Gwenview is trying to parse all images across drives or something? Since this happens regardless of which folder I open. There are a significant amount of images and videos across my devices, almost 70,000 on one drive on my PC. These are primarily large, uncompressed Steam Screenshots (thousands of these are 15-17mb). Maybe the volume and size of the files is causing Gwenview to take a long time to "load"? Ideally, Gwenview would be as close to instantaneous when opening an image as possible, assuming adequate hardware and drive speed. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Perhaps a prerequisite is to have a significant amount of high resolution, large image files. 2. Open Gwenview for the first time on a boot. 3. It is significantly slower than you'd expect, taking at minimum about 30-45 seconds but upwards of several minutes before it can become usable. 4. Close Gwenview and re-open the image 5. It loads up much faster (the number at the bottom-middle of the display parses all images in the folder much more quickly. OBSERVED RESULT Gwenview is quite slow on a first load, but is faster on subsequent loads (although it could still be faster). Until it has fully loaded, it is too slow to interact with. As an example if you take a screenshot and want to crop it, it can take a very long time if you haven't opened Gwenview in that session. Even if you have, it is still slower than what it ideally should be. EXPECTED RESULT Gwenview should not necessarily load images faster, but become responsive faster, to increase workflow speed. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Arch Linux KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.3 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.4.0 Qt Version: 6.7.2 Kernel Version: 6.10.2-zen1-1-zen (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor Memory: 31.3 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX ADDITIONAL INFORMATION * This isn't new behaviour, it has been this way for many years, I just never got around to reporting it before :-) * I had a look around in the settings and didn't fine anything. Looking online it seems like people have complained about this before, but every issue I saw explicitly mentioned high CPU usage while loading. My CPU usage does not increase significantly overtime when waiting on Gwenview (there is a spike up to around 50% when opening but it dies down quickly).
This is still an issue with Gwenview 25.04.1. Gwenview takes several minutes if a folder even has only a few thousand images in it. I do not believe it has worsened per se since I opened this issue, I believe the load time just becomes longer as there are more images in a folder.
Thanks for your report! This to me sounds familiar from my experience with remote shares causing delays in applications starting (Gwenview, Dolphin). There are several open and confirmed reports for this. Is it possible that it is trying to wake up any sleeping disks or remote resources (like KDE Connect, network shares etc.) on your first startup?
Updating the status here as this is pending some information from the reporter. Thanks!
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Hey there! It should not be related to remote disks, as it works normally most of the time when using my boot drive. This even persists across a new installation on a new drive. On the boot drive, Gwenview opens images pretty fast, but on external drives it takes a long time if there are more than a few thousand images and videos. The issue persists even if KDE Connect is not running. I have tried a few of my other SATA drives too and the issue persists. The common factor here is that any drive that is not my boot drive and has a significant number of large images (thousands of 10mb+ each images) it can take quite a long time for Gwenview to open and become responsive.
Yes, in with tens or hundreds of thousands of files Gwenview hangs quite a bit. From what I understand the problem is that Gwenview tries to get the MIME type of every file in the dir upfront before proceeding with rendering the images. There are a number of similar reports with some research done into optimizations regarding this. Most notably: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=499806 AND https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=499551#c7 It sounds to me this is the same issue here, so we may consider flagging this as a duplicate.