Hi folks,

I am wondering if someone else is having this problem: I just upgraded Kubuntu to 23.04 (KDE Plasma Version 5.27.4) and now suddenly loading RAW images to Gwenview (Version 22.12.3) takes a long time. I've tried Nikon, Canon, and Fujifilm RAW files-- same problem. I also installed a more recent Gwenview version (23.04.0) via "Snap", and this problem does not exist there, though I ran into other problems in the snap version. I'd like to find a quick fix and use the Gwenview version in the official Ubuntu repo, as compiling the source is kind of pain in the neck with all the KDE development dependencies.

Thanks in advance for any clues.

A "long time" is not yet an international unit, despite its lively use. What does long mean? My small power-saving CPU, on which I write here, has I think 12 cores and each of them oscillates 4400 million times a second. Now you might think that with that kind of speed, any program, graphics or text, should be ready to go the moment the contacts of input devices like mouse or keyboard touch. lol.
Take Darktable, which is "faster" and is aimed at photographers.

Well, I assume that you are just trying to be funny out of boredom, as I think that anyone who is using Gwenview and hit that problem would have noticed it, when suddenly their RAW images started to take "too long to load" I agree that this is not a scientific unit of time, but seriously, if this is a bug or unpolished code, you do not need a PhD in physics to notice a time difference, though, incidentally I do have a PhD in physics OK, to be more precise then: it takes about 5-6 seconds to load a RAW image, while loading jpegs is instantaneous, on a laptop, with a pretty current CPU and 16 GB of RAM. Mind you, RAW files were loading instantly using the same machine, prior to upgrading Kubuntu. And please don't go into things like "pretty current CPU is not a valid spec", as I am also tech staff at a supercomputing center and don't see the point of talking pedantically when there is an obvious difference in performance with an image viewer.

I just compiled Gwenview from scratch (using the latest source code in the git repo), and the problem is still there, though somehow, it does not exist in the flatpak and snap versions.

About Darktable-- thank you. I do use it, along with Rawtherapee, but mostly for image processing. Gwenview's value for me is that it is way easier and faster to work with, compared to RAW processors, when you want to just quickly sort your photos; think like using a file browser for file sorting.