Don't block UI when saving XMP sidecar files.

rbuchberger commented 1 year ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When set to save sidecar files on edit, and working with photos saved to a slow location such as a network drive, the UI can become unresponsive for several seconds when applying changes to many photos at once. An example would be applying tags to all photos in a directory.

Setting darktable to never save sidecar files fixes this issue, though then the user must remember to save them manually when finished.

Describe the solution you'd like Perform these operations asynchronously. The UI should always be responsive.

Alternatives

Additional option to save XMP sidecars on exit
Option to manually save only out-of-date sidecar files
(Might already exist, I haven't searched carefully) - CLI method to update XMP sidecar files, which I can run via a nightly cron job.

Additional context

My personal setup has the RAW files saved to an HDD based NAS, but the darktable database is on a local SSD. Not sure how common that is. This is mostly an issue for me when organizing my library - adding & deleting tags, titles, etc. Freezes of a few seconds don't sound bad, but when it happens repeatedly it's easy to get frustrated.

Anyway, thanks a ton for the software! Y'all are doing amazing work :)

ralfbrown commented 1 year ago

Duplicate of #5722. I had this on my to-do list, but life has been keeping me from putting in time to work on dt.

rbuchberger commented 1 year ago

Ahh, sorry about that. I searched the existing issues pretty carefully but not carefully enough it appears.

Nilvus commented 1 year ago

@ralfbrown: as #5722 is closed, do we keep this one opened or not?

ralfbrown commented 1 year ago

@Nilvus: We should keep this one open. @rbuchberger: You may well have missed the older issue since it was auto-closed. I knew about it because I commented on it.

ralfbrown commented 1 year ago

Heh, I missed that I had in fact raised the same thing as a feature request: #8909.

github-actions[bot] commented 1 year ago

This issue did not get any activity in the past 60 days and will be closed in 365 days if no update occurs. Please check if the master branch has fixed it and report again or close the issue.

rbuchberger commented 1 year ago

This issue did not get any activity in the past 60 days and will be closed in 365 days if no update occurs. Please check if the master branch has fixed it and report again or close the issue.

Still an issue, should stay open.

github-actions[bot] commented 1 year ago

This issue did not get any activity in the past 60 days and will be closed in 365 days if no update occurs. Please check if the master branch has fixed it and report again or close the issue.

ralfbrown commented 1 year ago

Still on my to-do list but probably won't get to it for a few more months.

craig2112 commented 1 year ago

I think this is related: When I am editing with a local copy, the UI sometimes hangs for several seconds. This happens frequently. Using Windows Process Explorer, it seems to get hung up when attempting to write the XMP file at the original unavailable location.

github-actions[bot] commented 1 year ago