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Archisman Panigrahi
Asked: 2020-04-18 01:21:44 +0800 CST

Gwenview is too slow to load image from a directory containing many images

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Gwenview takes a lot of time (sometimes 15+ seconds to load a 4 mb jpg file) to load an image from a directory where there are lot of images. This is probably because it tries to load all the images in the background, as after loading one, I can view all other images (by clicking arrow keys) without any lag. When there is only one image file in a directory, it loads very quickly.

Is there any way to tell Gwenview to only load the image it was asked to?

kubuntu plasma-5 19.10 gwenview

5 Answers

  1. Try these steps:

    1. Check if your disk is low in free space. IF YES, Try Empty space.
    2. Check if RAM is small.
    3. Try to split small number of images in separate folders.
    4. Also see if the file explorer like dolphin/ Nemo is also taking too much time opening these large images.
    5. Try disabling animations in settings

    This may Help you: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=164924

    Also in another post one suggested set desktop as folder and not as a desktop solved the issue.

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  2. Best Answer

    The only workaround I have found so far is based on https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=164924, which was there in Ajay's comment.

    Since Gwenview tries to create thumbnails of all images in the folder, it may take a lot of time to do so in a slower HDD. The workaround is to disable its access to thumbnail folder by changing its owner to root.

    It can be done by following these steps.

    1. rm ~/.cache/thumbnails/* (deletes all previously generated thumbnails)
    2. sudo chmod 555 ~/.cache/thumbnails (makes the folder owned by root)

    Note that now the computer will generate thumbnails every time any folder is opened, but it does not make it noticeably slow, and gwenview has a fast startup time. One can further disable thumbnails for certain extensions.

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  3. My solution to this ridiculous problem (opening an image in Gwenview takes much more time than firing up GIMP…) was to get rid of Gwenview and replace it with Nomacs.

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  4. It's actually possible (by now?) to make Gwenview start fast by changing settings in the GUI. But probably this actually does something similar to the known workarounds, because the behavior after this change is a bit silly (see below).

    Here you go:

    1. Hit Ctrl+m to make the menu appear
    2. Go to Settings, then Configure Gwenview...
    3. Click on Advanced
    4. Enable Low resource usage mode

    This will delete all thumbnails and deactivate the generation of thumbnails. Afterwards, Gwenview should be fast.

    Caveat: From now on, Gwenview will actively delete all existing thumbnails. This means that applications like Dolphin will be slow showing thumbnails, because they have to be generated first.

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  5. for me installing qt5-imageformats solved the problem, In my case gwenview was stuck on loading image...

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