Endless thumbnail redraw

Have you ever encountered a situation where if you go into an older project that you haven’t been in for a while, you notice that the thumbnails aren’t quite ready, and even though they draw reasonably quickly, Aperture as a whole seems to slow down for a while?

If you have encountered this, have you opened up the Activity Window (from the menu Window > Show Activity, or by clicking on the spinner under the Viewer) — always the way to see what’s going on in the background — only to see a long list of queued “processing” activities, like this?

This is something I’ve been battling for a long, long time. It’s always older projects; ones I haven’t been into in ages. And because I often am looking around for a particular photo, I tend to go through many, many old projects in a single sitting. And these queued “processing” activities have been a real drag on my workflow.

If I sat and waited, they would eventually finish. But the more projects I went into, and the more I scrolled within those projects, the more these mysterious activities would pile up.

The wrong solution

Because it seemed thumbnail related, I have used the command Photos > Generate Thumbnails on the entire library (going to the Photos view, selecting all images, and running the command) in hopes of forcing a refresh of all thumbnails, and of course hoping that would solve the issue. It never worked, and the command took overnight (at least!) to run on my very large library.

Needless to say, this never made a difference.

A unique approach

Then at some point, it occurred to me that if I could just scroll through the entire library, and let all these mystery activities queue up — and finish! — then maybe my problem would be solved. And there’s an easy way to do this; in any thumbnail view in Aperture, if you tap the J, K, and L keys, they do the same thing that JKL do in a video editor. J moves backwards, K stops, and L moves forward. If you tap L again, it moves faster. What this means is you can set Aperture to automatically scroll your entire library with a single keystroke.

So, I set off to do this. I selected the Photos view, and ensured that the search window was Showing All. I hid the Inspector (I key) and switched to Browser view (thumbnails only). I then made the thumbnails as big as possible, so that scrolling would take as long as possible (I knew from experience that Aperture would start to choke as this list got longer), tapped the L key to start scrolling, and went to bed.

The following morning, about a gazillion “processing” items were in my Activities monitor, and I wasn’t very far through my library (maybe 1/3 through at best). I selected all items in the queue and hit the Cancel Task button. This in itself took quite some time, as Aperture was moving at an absolute snail’s pace by now. Once all were cancelled, Aperture returned to normal. But of course, I wasn’t finished.

The following night, I did it again—but again starting from the top. The next morning, Aperture was doing the same thing, but it was farther along in my list. Good; progress.

Over and over I did this. I didn’t get to it every night, so it was probably well over a week before I finished. But one morning, I woke up to see the last photo in my collection in the Browser, and zero activity in the monitor.

Success?

That was about two weeks ago. I haven’t been using Aperture a lot since then, but when I have, I’ve been paying close attention to the Activity window, and I haven’t once seen the dreaded “processing” queuing up. My library feels dramatically faster as I switch projects now. It’s a significant difference!

It may be too soon to tell if the problem truly is gone, but I felt it was time to report my experience.

Why did this work?

As far as I can guess, there’s some other kind of activity that has to happen to draw the image to screen that isn’t included in thumbnail generation. My library is old. It’s been through every version of Aperture, and a LOT of changes. If your library is reasonably new or small, you probably haven’t seen this. But I’m very curious to know if anyone else has seen this, and more importantly, if this problem can be solved for you with this trick, too.

Please let me know in the comments if you’ve seen this, and if you have, give this “solution” a try and let us know if it helped!!

PS—don’t forget the sale!

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