See attachment for example. Here I've tried to import a small folder, and only half the images get thumbnails and when I press Import it freezes and has to be killed.

Hi,
I can't reproduce what you've reported. Can you please help follow guides described in http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/17741.page

Regards,
Brandon

I have the exact same issues. I have 86825 images I"m trying to import and it just dies on me. I have tested with smaller folders (10k) and it's just as misearable (but at least the 10k job finishse). However, even after I get all my pictures imported with these smaller pools the program just becomes useless as it never will start with my large library. The cache it builds is like 100K+ photos and around 3-4 gb of data.

I don't know how PhotoDirector saves references to the photos, but at 87k photos I would think you are putting a serious strain on your system resources. Have you opened Windows Task Manager and checked on your system's performance while this is going on? __________________________________
CORNBLOSSOM

I run an i7 with 16 gigs of ram and my primary drive (and the drive that holds the cache of thumbnails) is an SSD. CPU perf never really goes above 25% when starting PHd and the ram usage will grow to about 800 megs before the process just hangs.

To put some better perspective on this, I wiped out my old cache and PHd project file and started a new one. I have 8143 pictures in the library, memory usage is 330 megs and the CPU (while started and loading the library) was about 10-15%. It looks like the bulk of the time is spent in I/O with my drive reading the tree structure to load up. Using sysinternals process monitor I can see that it spins my HD at 11:52:09 for the 1st directory in my library and then it does not get done until 11:52:31. So there was 13 seconds of I/O just to rebuild the tree in PHd.

This 13 seconds was for 8700 photos in 165 folders. If you go back to my 87,000 that will not load is 10x the number of photos in 8500 (yes, 8.5k) folders. I guess if we start to do some basic math we can see how it would take some time to load. However, as i stated the process just dies and never really finishes.

At this I would assume the devs at Phd could or would potentially do something a bit more friendly on load (maybe some async jobs to read the file structure while at last allowing me into the program.

I have the same issues with importing from folders and subfolders as well, even with smaller numbers of pictures.
It would be nice to import the folders and subfolders of "my pictures" at once but the program freezes showing some thumbnails and some grey squares, exactly like the print screen of Testcofinest.
I tried to do small batches, some will import and others freeze.
This is a normal import that works perfectly well in Picasa and Adobe photoshop elements, so it should work here.
It would also be nice if the program would check "my pictures" folder for changes (additions, deletions)

Hi - does anyone know if this is still a problem in the retail version? My trial is coming to an end and I still haven't been able to really test the software without my full library in there!

Thanks!

If you have the preview quality in the File Handling options set on standard or 1:1 instead of minimal, it will still be a problem.

Use minimal and you won't have the problem of the import process taking ages in the rendering stage.

You can also use a few different projects to split your library in more managable chunks, I did that.

The project management feature is still rudimentary (hint hint Cyberlink), but it works and does the job. danny