Unless I’ve completely fucked up auto-mounting (I did fuck up permissions and accidentally deleted a mountpoint somehow, but fixed those), then I have successfully formatted /dev/hdb1 from NTFS, which it was back when I still used XP without being forced and needed access to my photos, to ext3, which should be faster access. Write speed is about double that of NTFS, and hopefully that will apply to read speed, too. That means the current month is on one ext3 partition of an internal drive, 2007 and “completed” months of 2008 (frequently accessed) are on another ext3 partition of an internal drive, and everything before that (plus backups of those two years, seldom accessed) is on one partition of an external USB drive, also ext3. That effectively eliminates the need for ntfs-3g (except for when I manually mount my XP partition), which, while very handy, was not necessary for a photo storage drive, and hopefully was the cause for Picasa 3 OM-NOM-NOMMING my fucking CPU like there was no tomorrow. I understand it runs on its own customised build of Wine, so there’s a slight performance hit there, but unless it’s importing new files or generating thumbnails, then it doesn’t need to be a fucking hog. I tried an import with IntiPunktu, which is cute (and python), and after importing the stuff from the NTFS partition, it ate CPU cycles, so I think that might just be what’s going on with Picasa, too. I hate F-Spot with a passion, Gthumb is nice, but only as a browser, not a photo collection manager, and that GQview is just plain goddamned ugly, so I’m down to Picasa (with convenient upload to my Web Albums), or IntiPunktu, presuming that the NTFS was causing the CPU hit (and that it isn’t actually attempting to create folders where I didn’t fucking tell it to create folders).

Now, I just sit back and wait for the nearly 10000 files from 2007 to finish copying. Could be worse…if I was copying all the photos I have (just mine, none that anyone has sent), I’d be waiting for nearly 45000 files. Holy fuck, Batman, I take a lot of photos. In bug season, I average 300-600 in a weekend (that does include any that are later deleted for being substandard), and a maximum of 30 actually make it to Flickr. What do I do with the rest? They just sort of hang out on my HDDs and on a bunch of backup DVDs and…do nothing. Then again, one never knows when one might need that photo of a butterfly from the summer of 2006 that wasn’t the best of the lot, so it didn’t get on Flickr. 😀

Come on, files…copy! Can’t complain, though; at least the file copy dialog gives an accurate time estimate, and does a “countdown” of the number still waiting to be copied, which is more than can be said for Windows. That always pissed me off; Win’s time estimate is practically never anything close to accurate, and if you so much as open a web browser, it’ll go from an estimate of 2 minutes to 7 or 8 minutes. Ubuntu doesn’t even faze the CPU or RAM, and it happily copies whilst I go about my computing business. I ♥ Linux.

Hm…I wonder whether Picasa will have to re-import those photos, or whether it’ll just look in the same spot and know it’s already “seen” them? I didn’t change the name of the mountpoint–it’s still called /NTFS–and the directory structure is the same, so the only difference is the file system. Well, in 5 minutes, I guess we’ll see! 🙂

Well, it’s certainly better (after the import), though it’s still using more CPU than I think it should; I don’t know why it needs 10% to just sit there and do nothing after it’s finished generating thumbs. Nonetheless, 10-15% is a definite improvement over 80+, and I’ll take it because it’s really the only viable option. It’s the only photo manager that I like, or at least the only one that does what I want. I did get GQview to look more the way I want, but it still can’t “ignore” non-photo directories, or scroll through thumbnails of folders like Picasa; I have to switch folders to see the next batch of thumbs. That doesn’t help me when I don’t remember what month I took the photo, and certainly don’t know what it’s called. In Picasa, I can just breeze through the thumbs until something catches my eye. Oh well, I guess I can live with it; it’s not like I spend hours going through photos anyway. I apparently fixed fstab correctly; I even rebooted, just to make sure it’d auto-mount the partitions I wanted (and not the ones I don’t) at the mount points I’d specified.