PaintShop 2018 disappointment

[kapral_1]

I've been using Corel products for many years, the latest one being PaintShopProX2 purchased about 2007. It was great. Now I upgraded my machine to Windows 10 and my old faithful X2 no longer works.
I downloaded trial version Paint Shop Pro 2018. What a disaster!!!
First: it is VERY SLOW in almost all aspects of editing. Using crop tool is now so difficult, it is almost not usable. It takes about 3 seconds to drag a node across. I mean I grab the corner drag it and it takes long time to respond. Also dialog boxes are slow to open.
Second: Window resize. In Preferences>View I've ticked all the boxes, exactly as in my old X2. When resizing an image, the window seems completely out of control. To explain this issue I will try to attach some screen shots. Image99 shows the picture before resizing with those large, undesirable margins, Image100 shows the window after resizing the image. This problem goes on. With my settings the window should "hug" the image. Instead it leaves large margins around the image. Also images appear too small, almost like the window is the right size, but the image is shrunk. When I switch tool eg. from crop to straighten, the image zooms out of control. When I opened two almost identical images by drag and drop, one opens in 100% zoom with scroll bars and the other one is 48% zoom with those strange margins around it.
Third: Having to use external program to scan images in is real pain.
Those problems makes the new PaintShop very "user unfriendly".

[JoeB]

Dragging nodes with the Crop tool works just fine and fast for me. Also, it is fast with all methods of editing.

However, with regard to the other issue it's only the Crop tool that has that issue. Read this thread in this forum:

viewtopic.php?f=56&t=63351

[hartpaul]

If you switch to another tool and change the scaling of your image then the window will once again hug your image. As mentioned in that other post that Joe has linked, the new crop tool has been a disaster for the majority of people and Corel should revert to the same operation as in X9 ASAP.

[Kiwi Bob]

Hi
I also find it soo slow but found the reason in another post. On startup, PSP 2018 deletes the picture thumbnail cache that it created on the previous session and then rebuilds it. I have 33,000 photos and it takes over an hour to rebuild the cache during which time it struggles to do other tasks and tends to lockup on anything complex. If you do use it to manage a large photo collection, the perhaps remove the collection and see if response time improves. I have provided feedback to Corel and hope it is not their way of achieving the promoted "faster startup".
Regards
Bob

[hartpaul]

And do you need access to 33000 images every time that you use PSP. I find that I may only work on 10 to 300 images in a session so often copy those to a working folder on my desktop.

The more years that you take photographs the larger your collection gets and the more it will clog up any cataloging system that uses a database and thumbnails.

I learnt this back in early 2000s when there was a program called Google desktop and it would catalog all files on your hard drive so that you had the advantages of a google search in being able to find any file. At that time I had a 40 GB hard drive and when the catalog files started approaching 10 GB I gave it up. Good with small numbers of images / files but an absolute stuff up when you reached large numbers .

I decided to use my own system of naming folders and files and placing 1 or 2 samples into a master folder.
eg cloud studies went into a folder with the reverse date and each file renamed using part of that folder name eg 060823aCloudStudies for name of folder.
and cld060823a001.jpg for first image in that folder to say cld060823a045 for the last image. I might then put 2 of the best images in another master folder .

That way all the cld... images from many years would be arranged alphabetically in that master folder and it was easy to find an image near what I wanted and know what year and folder I needed to locate to see the rest of the images of that type.

In 2006 alone I shot over 94000 images so if I used Corel to catalog those I guess it would probably take over 3 hours before it was ready. The images from 2003 to 2018 are scattered over two 2 TB external hard drives and using Manage for that would be unManageable.

[Kiwi Bob]

My expectation is for my family to easily view any of our 33000 images anytime they open PSP.

Times change. Families no longer get 'traditional' paper snaps of those special moments. Without organisation, their digital photos may be lost to them over time; or perhaps they do try to store them. In this day and age, a program of this type should make this easy by enabling them to be stored, catalogued and viewed at ease - even if the collection becomes large. Computers are up to this task and storage is now cheap.

The deletion of the thumbnail cache on startup must surely be a bug. If it is by design then this is 'nuts' as the size of my 33,000 thumbnail cache is only 1.5 GB.

This brings me to another disappointment with 2018 - their 'Smart' Collection cataloging system. My family collection spans 40 years, the pics are in folders by year and subfolders - which are a pain to navigate. The photos are not tagged, some earlier cameras had incorrect year settings, some are bitmaps and many are scanned photos with no metadata. Their 'smart' collection cataloging is essentially based on metadata and lacks the basic feature of also being able to group by selected folders.

My projects for this year are to better organise our photos and locate key ones to incorporate into video segments. Visually scanning through sections of a collection with ease, is a must.

Indeed, if a collection is not easily assessable by people, then the whole point of keeping photos is lost. The days of having to navigate through a folder system just to view them, needs to become a thing of the past. Young people have grown up with Picasa style viewing. Corel need to develop on this and make their 'smart collections' smart.

[JoeB]

People usually purchase Paintshop Pro firstly for its editing features, particularly given its reasonable price. If your primary goal is organization of some 33,000 images that your family can easily access then you should be concentrating on finding photo management/organizing software. The link below might be a place to start researching such software. Paintshop pro only comes 4th in their listings, and their review of it admits that it's PSP's editing features as opposed to its photo management features that they like, whereas the first three favorites are preferred for their photo management capabilities.

http://www.toptenreviews.com/software/m ... -software/

[Kiwi Bob]

It is a pity to have to go to change to another program to achieve a better combined edit and management capability, especially when PSP has a complete tab dedicated to 'Manage'. The image organisation is needed so that I may better target its editing capabilities. I did provide my feedback to Corel, but I am still disappointed that the 2018 release has not done better in these areas and if people do not provide their user experience then things may not change with the times.

Thank you for the response and link it is appreciated.

[bruce1951]

Suggestion if you haven't already done it!
Create a folder with just a few images in it. Then open and close PSP using that folder. This 'should' avoid PSP rebuilding the cache every time.
I have thousands of images and yet never have an issue with PSP trying to rebuild the caches everytime. (Caveat - I always open and close PSP in Edit mode).

bruce

[MarkZ]

My expectation is for my family to easily view any of our 33000 images anytime they open PSP.

The deletion of the thumbnail cache on startup must surely be a bug. If it is by design then this is 'nuts' as the size of my 33,000 thumbnail cache is only 1.5 GB.

I agree that the deletion of the thumbnail cache at startup in PSP2018 is a bug. In past versions of PSP thumbs for Collections were kept indefinitely, for me that being the benefit of Collections. I submitted that as a bug to Corel months ago but have not had a reply.

There has been a lot of discussion on this forum about startup times and the majority (and I) appear to have relatively quick startup. Do you have all your image in one folder? That would explain the very long time to create the thumbs.

Suggestion if you haven't already done it!
Create a folder with just a few images in it. Then open and close PSP using that folder. This 'should' avoid PSP rebuilding the cache every time.
I have thousands of images and yet never have an issue with PSP trying to rebuild the caches everytime. (Caveat - I always open and close PSP in Edit mode).

bruce

From my testing what I see is that the thumbs cache is rebuilt when a folder is accessed, whether in Manage or Edit. When PSP2018 is closed the thumbs are retained but the cache is cleared when it is reopened. If you open in edit with the same folder selected as when you last closed I suspect there would not be a need to rebuild the cache. If a folder contains a few hundred images the time needed to create the thumbs cache is not onerous.

I agree that PSP file manager is not great and a separate specialized program would do a far better job. I prefer ASP capabilities in this regard to PSP but it is onerous setting it up.

[JoeB]

I agree that PSP file manager is not great and a separate specialized program would do a far better job. I prefer ASP capabilities in this regard to PSP but it is onerous setting it up.

ASP2 is the fifth choice of the site I posted the link to, not scoring all that well in most categories. But for individual users, of course, other factors can make one program preferable and perhaps more intuitive for them to use than other programs.

[Kiwi Bob]

I just wanted to group my photos into 5 year segments. But smart collections can not group based on folders. I then tried a workaround to achieve this by tagging those images that can be tagged. But PSP would repeatedly crash trying to bulk tag while it was re-caching. (I kept restarting the PC thinking it would help overcome the problem). Very frustrating.

Now I am aware of the problem, I can use workarounds such as those being suggested.

But the point is, other users, even with smaller collections, may experience poor performance when using PSP just after starting it. I have supported Corel for many years and should not have to change to other products when I feel that they can tweak their software to overcome these 2 failings, and by doing so give their users a better experience. This is my hope.

[LeGrand]

Hi
I also find it soo slow but found the reason in another post. On startup, PSP 2018 deletes the picture thumbnail cache that it created on the previous session and then rebuilds it. I have 33,000 photos and it takes over an hour to rebuild the cache during which time it struggles to do other tasks and tends to lockup on anything complex. If you do use it to manage a large photo collection, the perhaps remove the collection and see if response time improves. I have provided feedback to Corel and hope it is not their way of achieving the promoted "faster startup".
Regards
Bob

Got exactly the same problem. I'M really deceipt from Corel new Upgrade, Paint Shop 2018 and Video Studio 2018, got a lot of problem and don't like the way they are going. Hope they will return to their higher quality then trying to change success software

[LeGrand]

I just wanted to group my photos into 5 year segments. But smart collections can not group based on folders. I then tried a workaround to achieve this by tagging those images that can be tagged. But PSP would repeatedly crash trying to bulk tag while it was re-caching. (I kept restarting the PC thinking it would help overcome the problem). Very frustrating.

Now I am aware of the problem, I can use workarounds such as those being suggested.

But the point is, other users, even with smaller collections, may experience poor performance when using PSP just after starting it. I have supported Corel for many years and should not have to change to other products when I feel that they can tweak their software to overcome these 2 failings, and by doing so give their users a better experience. This is my hope.

Think the same of you see my post
viewtopic.php?f=56&t=63466#p355347

[LeGrand]

Hi
I also find it soo slow but found the reason in another post. On startup, PSP 2018 deletes the picture thumbnail cache that it created on the previous session and then rebuilds it. I have 33,000 photos and it takes over an hour to rebuild the cache during which time it struggles to do other tasks and tends to lockup on anything complex. If you do use it to manage a large photo collection, the perhaps remove the collection and see if response time improves. I have provided feedback to Corel and hope it is not their way of achieving the promoted "faster startup".
Regards
Bob

Got same problem see this link: viewtopic.php?f=56&t=63466