photo sharing and upload picture albums photo forums search pictures popular photos photography help login
Tony Long | profile | all galleries >> Special Photo Projects >> POTN Projects >> DPP Performance July 26 2011 tree view | thumbnails | slideshow

DPP Performance July 26 2011

I was testing how Digital Photo Professional (DPP), the Canon Raw processing software, handled folders with a large number of files.

To do this, I opened the Windows Task Manager and put it in the Proocesses tab so I could see how much system memory was being used.

All seemed normal at first: when DPP was open to an empty folder, it took up a small amount of memory (image #1). When I opened the folder with over a thousand Raw files the software created thumbnails for each of the files, which was fine, and it stored them all in memory, fine I guess -- it did use over half a GigaByte of Ram (image #2), but, oh well.

Then I selected all the files and pushed a button to load all the photos into the Editing window. This doesn't open a separate interface but rather changes the interface to the Edit interface and loads the selected photos into a "film strip" and the "current" image into the main Preview window to be worked on using the Raw tools and other tools.

Well, to start with, no surprises, you could see the top image opening not fully "rendered" into the better Raw rendered preview and then it cleared up, but the system stayed "busy" for some seconds. What I realized is that the software was actually creating higher-quality previews for all the photos at the same time!

And then, to cause some real concern, when I brought up the Task Manager window, it showed that not only was the DPP Edit window using itself, over half a Gig of RAM, but the "normal" window with all those previews still loaded was still taking up memory, even though it was no longer the active/visible interface (image #3)!

So, the two processes were together taking up over 1 Gig of memory. This could be a concern to someone like me on a little laptop without a lot of RAM, or someone with an older computer with say only 2 Gig of RAM, but it could also be a concern to an active sports/event shooter or maybe a wildlife shooter who can easily shoot well over a thousand photos in a day, not to mention a multiple-day event where all the photos could be dumped into a "master file"...

So, I went back to the beginning and got three screen "snippings" of the three states of the Task Master -- maybe they will interest someone!
Task Manager Screen Shot Image #1
Task Manager Screen Shot Image #1
Task Manager Screen Shot Image #2
Task Manager Screen Shot Image #2
Task Manager Screen Shot Image #3
Task Manager Screen Shot Image #3