Obviously, the risk is that someone could change metadata (file ratings, etc), remove or add a file, etc, and you'll miss it because you didn't refresh, right? You have the same risk if you're working in PM when the same event occurs, but you don't do anything to trigger a refresh, right? (that is, I don't change tabs, don't do a "Command-/", and don't change focus to another window). For instance, if I'm back and forth between PM, email, Photoshop, chat, etc, perhaps I don't need it to refresh each and every time I go back. The only thing that I could see improving this situation is if you could tune PM (optionally) to either ignore refreshing the directory (aside from whatever it needs to do to keep up with changes that you're making to files in that PM session), or tune how frequently it might do the refresh. You need the inode file change info to determine if there's anything to scan, even in the best case scenario. So, obviously, the majority of the time is just trying to get inode data from the server - I get that, and there's not much that PM can do about it. An "ls -l" in that directory takes about 6 seconds. I did a couple of experiments, knowing that our network is pretty robust - with the settings in place specified in this thread, it takes about 7 seconds for PM to scan a directory containing 11,000 files (3914 images, RAW+JPG and XML files). Is there any way to tune the refresh behavior further, by any chance? I added those settings to PMDebug.txt, and it definitely seems to improve things a bit, but the delay is still really painful. Please let me know if this helps your situation. If you wanted to ignore all of the optional extensions you would put the following into your PMDebug.txt file: This means that if you rename/move/copy an item, the ignored files will not be processed in the operation and will not be renamed/moved/copied. Restart PM and those extensions set to be ignored will now be ignored and will no longer be associated with your files if they exist. If you want to ignore any of the above extensions, simply place them, one per line, in your PMDebug.txt file followed by ON, YES, or 1. Ignoring these extensions will significantly reduce the amount of network traffic utilized by Photo Mechanic when browsing a network drive. Unless you’re browsing folders that were edited by a much older version of Photo Mechanic, you can safely ignore this extension.) IGNORE_EXTENSION_XIP (XIP files were generated by older versions of Photo Mechanic prior to the existence of XMP sidecar files.
If you don’t use this application, you can safely ignore this extension.) IGNORE_EXTENSION_NKS (NKS files are used by Nikon Capture NX-D. If you don’t use this now extinct application, you can safely ignore this extension.) IGNORE_EXTENSION_RDSF (RDSF files are used by the RAW Developer application. If you don’t use Bibble, then you can safely enable ignoring this extension.) IGNORE_EXTENSION_BIB (BIB files are used by the Bibble RAW editor application.
If you don’t use QImage, then you can safely enable ignoring this extension.) IGNORE_EXTENSION_FLT (FLT files are for the QImage printing application. If you don’t use Lightzone, then you can safely enable ignoring this extension.) IGNORE_EXTENSION_LZN (LZN files are for the open source RAW editor Lightzone. If you don’t have CRW files then you can safely enable ignoring this extension.)
IGNORE_EXTENSION_THM (THM files are used with the CRW RAW format. The following flags can be added to a text file named PMDebug.txt which should be placed in Photo Mechanic’s preferences folder: