Sep 5
Reduce image-opening latency for medium-sized files
I have noticed a small but clearly perceptible delay when opening some images around 20 MB in size.
The current performance is already acceptable, and the delay is not severe, but for an image viewer whose overall experience is otherwise extremely fast and responsive, it is noticeable.
I would like to suggest further optimizing the image-opening path so that the first usable image appears as quickly as possible, especially for ordinary medium-sized images that do not require the very-large-image pipeline.
Ideally, after double-clicking an image, Ember should display either the final image or a high-quality preview with minimal perceptible delay, while any more expensive decoding or refinement continues asynchronously if necessary.
I understand that file size alone does not determine decode cost, and performance will vary with format, dimensions, compression, bit depth, and color processing. My point is specifically about time-to-first-visible-image / perceived opening latency, rather than total decode time.
If useful, I can provide specific sample images and measure the approximate opening latency for reproducible testing.
In Progress
Thanks for this, it led to a lot of work over the past two weeks. Opening a file is now noticeably faster. A photo opened from Explorer appears about half a second sooner, for example 1.0 s instead of 1.55 s for a 24 MP file on our test machine. Many formats open several times faster, and very large files show a picture right away while the full quality loads in the background. Flipping through a folder is faster too. This will be in the next release. If you'd like to try it before then, email beta@emberviewer.com and we'll send you a pre-release build. If some of your files still feel slow, a link to a few of them would help a lot. They'd go straight into our test set.