Automatic artist/album artist thumbnails with their albums [#17031][#17033]

[drakinite]

OK, checking this today and there really was a regression introduced: MM is trying to repeatedly load thumbs for files with no artwork --> resulting also in the lags described by you. I have fixed this issue for 2272 as https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=17033 (details in Mantis)

Thanks!

It's a lot better now than it was before, but scrolling quickly is still pretty stuttery. I think that for a good UX when MM5 is released to the general public, the UI slowdowns should be ironed out - Even if it's not a huge priority at the moment. Here's a demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df_TpO8iDJY
Watch it at 60 fps. It doesn't look as bad on video, but the stutters still feel quite awkward when you experience them yourself. I have a feeling that if the thumbnails are cached in memory, even if the cache lasts for just a few minutes, it would make it a lot smoother when browsing the grid views.

[drakinite]

I'm trying to think of how the thumbnail files are served (file:///temp/Thumbs/7D/9DUVYWS1WN9WCGFI-200px.jpg) - Is there some native code/program acting as a local webserver, that serves thumbnails from those temp directory?

The network request headers appear to block caching, which I have to assume is the cause of the client Always re-loading Every image when they scroll back into view. Is it possible to change the cache-control headers to something like max-age=3600, to see if that reduces the scroll stuttering? I really do think it would make a big difference.

[Ludek]

Hi, thanks for the feedback. As the images are already cached locally in the temp dir then I don't expect that caching it by browser would help much unless the images are cached in memory, but in that case it would grow up the memory used by MM processes which is not good especially when MM is still 32-bit application with the 4GB memory limits (and thus risk of out-of memory exceptions). But we will definetly consider it (and try) when making further optimizations.

EDIT: As confirmed with devs the cache was intentianally disabled for the local files (as it consumed a lot of memory)

[drakinite]

Ah, okay. That's a shame.
All of my album thumbnails total to 6.8 MB, but I guess that for large libraries, it can add up to a lot. Maybe the thumbnails can be transformed into spritesheets, so they can be loaded 5-10 at a time, reducing the number of internal network requests? I guess that would be pretty complex to do, but now I'm just throwing ideas at the wall.

[drakinite]

Sounds good to me, actually the code for this already exists -- as originally the artists have been just collage of album images (like e.g. the genres are currently).

Added as https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=17031

Hey Ludek, it looks like the art thumbnails disappear permanently in the artists/album artists grid if you click Default Icon in the Lookup Image screen. Is that intended behavior?