Photoprism and Fast Loading

Last night I spent hours going through videos and changing them from “public” to private, so that they would be removed from the index. I went through them by loading 2024 without filters and worked my way through 60 or so files at a time, before scrolling, and waiting for content to load. After a few hours I got bored so tried to switch things up.

I decided to sort images by camera but that’s slow, so I tried to sort by colour, and by category, and more. I found that if you sort by colour, category and other filters the video thumbnails load within seconds. I don’t mean sixty images per scroll. I mean hundreds of images at once.

The Goal

In my use case I wanted to make private or unindex thousands of files at a time. Imagine if you have a thousand images of a wedding, or three or four hundred images from a conference. If you want to change hundreds of files you want to be able to see all media assets at once, rather than mindlessly scrolling and waiting to load.

Filter Searches

I counted and with the unfiltered process I had to wait at least eight seconds for 60 thumbnails to load, and then scroll again. By using various filters that was reduced to seconds, for every image.

On the same topic, if you want to bulk modify media assets the limit is 999 files at once. Once the changes are applied you can select the files that were not processed, and continue from there if you selected more than 999 files.

This is good for adding the country for images where that information is not in the exif, or adding a photographer’s name if that is not in the exif. It’s a trick worth knowing about.

Hundreds of Faces

In the process I also learned that my instance of PhotoPrism could index faces from video and photos. If you take photos at an event then PhotoPrism will help you index photos according to which faces are in them. De-rushing videos becomes faster. Of course this probably works for keyframe images, rather than actual video but that’s still great if each face is used as a keyframe for the relevant file.

If you’re at a wedding you can define the names that go with faces and it can find images with the bride, groom, and other key personalities. Instead of just giving a photo book you can give them a way of searching by key individuals. The advantage of using PhotoPrism is that it’s hosted at your home or work place, rather than in the cloud and should thus be more secure, as well as kept out of Google or Facebook’s hands.

And Finally

In the end I marked 68,000 video files as private. That is 68,000 files that I could migrate from PhotoPrism Instance to another. I could have one for personal photographs and video, and the second one for random videos from the web. Do the videos, themselves, have any value? Nope, but the photo archive does, and the establishement of a faster work flow does too. The faster we can process tens of thousands of files, the more time we can dedicate to high value media assset management.