Whenever I start Aspects, I get the message “Loading Library” - this usually takes quite a while, often ewen a few minutes. During this I can’t even minimise the Window, since the minimise/maximise/close buttons on the right up corner do not work.
Expected behavior
I should be able to minimise the window to be able to do some other things while waiting for the program to start up.
Actually I should also be able to close the app in case I opend it by mistake and now don’t want to wait a few minutes untill I am able to close it. Especially when I am on low laptop battery
This used to be a guard against performing operations on the library while it was still being loaded. However, today there really is no reason for keeping this, so the next release will not disable the controls.
Being able to cancel an ongoing library load is planned (#276), but will be tackled after the 1.0.0 release is out.
Some questions about the library load times, since those seem to be longer than expected:
How many photos are in the library
What kind of disk is the library stored on and how is is connected to the computer
Is there any particular status message on the screen that takes up most of the time
For comparison, I have a test library with 1 million images, stored on a slow external (SMR) hard disk – this takes a bit longer on the first load after system startup, but then about 7 seconds to load.
Its my internal SSD: FanXiang S880 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD. My Photos are on a seperate NTFS Partition.
I’ll have to look which status message takes most of the time, I’ll come back to this.
To me, it looks like it’s mostly an issue when I switch OS. Like, I added a bunch of photos while on Windows. Then the next time I open the library on Ubuntu, it takes ages to load. Like it needs to index all of them again.
Now I can confirm - the very long loading times during startup only happen, whenever I switches OS after I added new photos to my library. Then, the “Loading Library -The metadata of some images is still missing and is being loaded from disk.”-screen takes up to a few minutes for me. After this its only shows “loading library” without further information, while the fan of the laptop stays on high. for me it takes 20-30 minutes in total, while, the program is not usable, but I also can’t close it. It doesn’t matter in which direction I switched OS - it always happens whenever I did some changes on the former OS.
Okay, thanks for the confirmation. I actually have a very similar setup, but the drive uses an exFAT partition instead of NTFS, maybe that somehow makes a difference – I’ll try with an NTFS partition.
I’ve tried to reproduce this on an NTFS drive, but everything went smoothly for me. How large is the log file if you compress it as a zip or gzip file?
Otherwise, on Linux, you could run something like this in the terminal (assuming the file is currently called aspect-log.sdl and is in the current directory) to cap the log at the first 10,000 lines, which should hopefully be sufficient to catch the cause:
head -n 10000 aspect-log.sdl > aspect-log-truncated.sdl
Thanks for sending the log. The cause of this appears to be some kind of file access issue with the metadata cache journal file, which causes the disk cache to be circumvented completely:
D:\Fotos\01 Current Aspect Folder\.cache/metadata\journal: Die Datei oder das Verzeichnis ist beschädigt und nicht lesbar.
This sounds like the file system still isn’t fully repaired, or something has been corrupted again. Can you try to run a S.M.A.R.T. analysis on the disk to make sure this is not a hardware issue? Under Linux this should work with smartmontools:
sudo apt install smartmontools
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
Where /dev/sda may need to be replaced with the actual device name of the disk (can be found in the “Disks”/“Laufwerke” application).
Thank you for pointing this out!
indeed, I had to run another chkdsk on windows to repair my partition - I guess it’s a leftover from my last try to start aspect without mounting the partition first??
Nevertheless, my S.M.A.R.T. seems to be fine:
joshu@X1-Ubuntu:~$ joshu@X1-Ubuntu:~$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-6.8.0-90-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number: Fanxiang S880 4TB
Serial Number: FXS880232720524
Firmware Version: SN12237
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID: 0x1e4b
IEEE OUI Identifier: 0x000000
Total NVM Capacity: 4.000.787.030.016 [4,00 TB]
Unallocated NVM Capacity: 0
Controller ID: 0
NVMe Version: 2.0
Number of Namespaces: 1
Namespace 1 Size/Capacity: 4.000.787.030.016 [4,00 TB]
Namespace 1 Formatted LBA Size: 512
Namespace 1 IEEE EUI-64: d0d0d0 d0d0d0d0d0
Local Time is: Tue Jan 6 00:40:01 2026 CET
Firmware Updates (0x14): 2 Slots, no Reset required
Optional Admin Commands (0x0017): Security Format Frmw_DL Self_Test
Optional NVM Commands (0x005f): Comp Wr_Unc DS_Mngmt Wr_Zero Sav/Sel_Feat Timestmp
Log Page Attributes (0x0a): Cmd_Eff_Lg Telmtry_Lg
Maximum Data Transfer Size: 128 Pages
Warning Comp. Temp. Threshold: 90 Celsius
Critical Comp. Temp. Threshold: 95 Celsius
Supported Power States
St Op Max Active Idle RL RT WL WT Ent_Lat Ex_Lat
0 + 6.50W - - 0 0 0 0 0 0
^Cshu@X1-Ubuntu:~$ 0 Extended Completed without error 13503 ~ing_LBA NSID Seg SCT Code
So I still don’t realy understand where all this come from…
