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Author Topic: Printing Images Stored on NAS Drive  (Read 10343 times)
JohnFla
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« on: August 22, 2010, 04:45:17 PM »

Hello,  We store all our photographs on a NAS hard drive.  All three PCs I use are connected via 1GB fast ethernet. Loading images into the QImage queue is very slow to load, crop, and print vs Lightroom 3.  Both QImage and Lightroom are pulling the files from the same (NAS) network drive but QImage grinds to a halt.  I prefer QImage over Lightroom but the speed of QImage is a deal breaker.   Any suggestions to speed up QImage?

Thanks,  John
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Box Brownie
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« Reply #1 on: August 27, 2010, 12:42:06 AM »

Hello,  We store all our photographs on a NAS hard drive.  All three PCs I use are connected via 1GB fast ethernet. Loading images into the QImage queue is very slow to load, crop, and print vs Lightroom 3.  Both QImage and Lightroom are pulling the files from the same (NAS) network drive but QImage grinds to a halt.  I prefer QImage over Lightroom but the speed of QImage is a deal breaker.   Any suggestions to speed up QImage?

Thanks,  John

Hi

Just a thought because like you I have a NAS and though QI does not 'grind to a halt' I find it slow???  Having said that my mini network is only a 10/100 though my NAS has a Gigabit capability the rest of the connectivity is 100 speed.  I fully intend to upgrade to include a Gigabit switch but that is not yet Sad

So what speed is your network?  And if already Gigabit I wonder what the bottleneck could be???
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BrianPrice
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« Reply #2 on: August 27, 2010, 06:11:43 AM »

John

The answer is very simple - copy your file onto your PC before printing. It will only take seconds, everything will run faster and printing will be more reliable.

Brian
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Terry-M
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« Reply #3 on: August 27, 2010, 07:39:19 AM »

Quote
The answer is very simple - copy your file onto your PC before printing. It will only take seconds, everything will run faster and printing will be more reliable.
That is what I do. I have a 1TB network drive on which I have all images and it's quicker than digging out the dvd archive of the old stuff.
Terry
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« Reply #4 on: August 28, 2010, 03:18:41 PM »

What type of files are they and what resolution: are they raw or some other format?  Network file access is molasses slow on any system.  Lightroom isn't as sophisticated as Qimage in the printing department so it is likely doing a lot less with the file.  Qimage actually opens the file and interrogates it for resolution, looks for and extracts the ICC profile so that can be displayed in the queue, etc.  Those simple file accesses are a no brainer for a local drive but they are a problem on a network just due to the slow nature of opening a file on the network.  Lightroom also forces you to "import" images so they may be automatically caching some data on your local drive.  Gigabit networks make no difference when it comes to this slow file access.  You're not going to get anywhere near the maximum 100MB per second as far as file reads either.  I'd recommend using something other than network file storage when dealing with image files, especially ones on the large side.  That said, you may find that Qimage is faster if you let it finish building thumbs before you start adding images to the queue.  I don't know if you are doing that or not.  In Lightroom, that part is done when you import.

Regards,
Mike
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JohnFla
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« Reply #5 on: August 30, 2010, 04:38:15 PM »


We convert RAW files to maximum quality JPG files from 8 megapixel 1D Mark 2 cameras. Not huge files.  We have QImage set to view "filenames only" to help speed the process of listing all the images but it doesn't help the speed of adding prints to the queue.  Each folder has about 600 images, adding images to the print queue takes about 8 seconds...  Add another 8 seconds to load into the full page editor for cropping... adjusting crops takes another 8 seconds for the program to respond... Way to slow in Qimage.  We are currently printing from Lightroom as a compromise to get work done but still would love to go back to QImage.

Printing images from the local drive is nice and fast in QImage.  We have three workstations that need to access the files at any given time so copying images to the local drive for printing is not an ideal workflow.  Like Mike said, the Gigabit Ethernet doesn't do much to speed up the file transfer from the NAS to QImage.

Lightroom's database structure has an advantage over QImage for speed but if QImage "Ultimate" offers a speed boost for network drives I'll buy it!

John
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« Reply #6 on: August 30, 2010, 10:02:14 PM »

I don't think it has anything to do with Lightroom having a "database".  Something is way wrong if it is taking 8 seconds to load an image into the queue.  I just tried it here and I was trying it going across a wireless network and you know how much slower that is than a wired gigabit network.  I was adding ~10 to 12 MB JPEG's and they went into the queue almost instantly (no way to time it).  Is a network printer also selected?  I'm thinking that the printer querries that Qimage does when adding to a page might be delayed or some other program might be interfering.  Try setting Qimage to print to file instead of a printer and see if you still get a delay.  Even across a network, the delay should be just a fraction of a second once the thumbnails have been built.

Mike
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Terry-M
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« Reply #7 on: August 31, 2010, 07:35:40 AM »

Just to add some more data related to this thread.
I have a WD 1TB NAS at home here; it is not gigabit capable and the best transfer rate I get is about 35MB/s
I did some queue timing of 8Mpx jpegs (100% quality).
Individual images could be added to the queue "instantly"; 10 selected took about 0.3 secs per image.
20 and above images selected and added to the queue took much longer for some reason, at about 4 secs per image.
This is still much better than 8 secs per image.  Smiley
As far as cropping goes, either as an image crop (filter) or a print crop, that was as normal compared to an image on the local hard drive.
Terry
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