Digikam has always worked nicely for me. I recently setup a Synology DiskStation (DS212+) and moved all my pictures to it, keeping them in an encrypted folder. I mount that folder using cifs, as some bug prevents eCryptfs and NFS from working together.

This has led Digikam to being incredibly slow. Startup takes a very long time (several minutes for 41779 items, 123.8GB) but worse is how long it takes Digikam to write files. I like using Digikams import feature to copy new images from my camera to the hard drive because it checks for duplicates as well as creating a clear folder structure according to the dates the images were taken. Since I moved to using the network drive Digikam takes about 5 to 10 times as long to import photos than it did before. Saving modified or converted images takes equally long.

What I am looking for is a way to help Digikam speed things up or an alternative piece of software (I have never liked Digikam being so very much KDEish…). There are just so many features that only Digikam seems to combine, e.g.:

• Batch processing.
• Respects existing folder structure.
• Does not mess up files for other applications.
• *.NEF support.
• Caches thumbnails in a clean way.