I have about 15K photos in my collection and also see a lot of slowness. PhotoDirector appears to re-validate that all the photos it is attached to are still available during startup. Face tagging, though... wow, that is amazingly, painfully slow.

Detecting the face tags is actually pretty fast for me. What is super slow is the saving part: Whether I just click a button with the name of the person associated with the face or enter a new name, it can take a minute or two to just save one face. It is way, way worse if face tagging thinks that two different faces from two different people are the same. For example, a "group" of two photos, one of Person A and one of Person B. PhotoDirector thinks these are both photos of the same person. It's not, so I uncheck the photo of Person B, then select the name of Person A to assign to the remaining checked photo of Person A. Doing that will peg my i7 processor for between five and 10 full minutes, to the point Windows thinks the program is being unresponsive and asks if I want to kill it.

In fact, I'm typing up my response to your post right now while I'm waiting for PhotoDirector to come back from one of these Person A/Person B operations. I was able to fire up my browser, search for this forum, log in, respond here, and PhotoDirector 8 is still eating 30% processor, nearly 2GB of RAM, and is entirely unresponsive to clicks. I will just have to wait.

I've got the latest patch that was just released; I excluded PhotoDirector from antivirus to ensure it's not slowed down; I have no idea how to speed it up. This is pretty much my only complaint. I can even live with the startup time if the face tagging didn't totally tank the thing.

For reference, I just tagged five faces and it took 1:45 not counting the time I was clicking - that's timing from the point where I click the person's name to the point the tag is saved and I'm allowed to click another name. That's an average of about 21 seconds to apply one face tag to one photo for one person. I feel like that's a lot.

I haven't timed one of the operations where I uncheck one face out of a group of faces and try to apply that.

Quote For reference, I just tagged five faces and it took 1:45 not counting the time I was clicking - that's timing from the point where I click the person's name to the point the tag is saved and I'm allowed to click another name. That's an average of about 21 seconds to apply one face tag to one photo for one person. I feel like that's a lot.

I haven't timed one of the operations where I uncheck one face out of a group of faces and try to apply that.

Thanks for this timing. The remark: "it takes so long" otherwise is often more a feeling or an impression. Unchecking faces before tagging takes a bit longer with me than accepting all in one go. It takes me a little less overall with an average of about 19 seconds. Still fairly long though.

I have stopped at 15K photos and about 70 people as the update time is rapidly increeasing.

Still hope that I either do something wrong, or that there is a trick or setting that helps making the face tagging and retrieval really useful. Because it is not.

I'm up to 17,100 pics with most having faces tagged. Before I start a session I reboot, shutdown background programs like backup, and get a big drink. Face Tagging still takes forever but PHD8 works. Previous versions would take forever then die. I hope future versions continue the improvements.

With the most recent update it ended up corrupting all my face tags and I lost them. Restoring from backup didn't fix it. It'd be nice if they were saved as metadata in the images rather than in some separate database.

I started redoing tagging and hit this again, ended up just not finishing. It sucks that I can't search by face but I don't have the kind of time to sit for a minute or two on every tag for tens of thousands of pictures.