antp.be forum

My movie catalogue is now over 73 mb (3652 movies) and it is now really slow in opening and printing. Is it possible that some images are too big or this is an acceptable size for such a large number of movies?

This file size looks very reasonable, I'd say, if you're using AMC's binary format that stores images inside the catalog file (*.amc).

Example:
If you have an average jpeg image of 30kb (which is still small in my eyes), 10 images will be 300kb, 100 images will be 3000kb, 1000 images will be 30.000kb=30MB. So 3652 movies with images would be even more than 100MB.

I think switching catalog to XML format and using external images should speed up loading of large catalogs a lot (though I never tested myself). It might lower memory usage, too. If you gonna try, be sure to keep a backup of your original catalog in a safe place !

Note: Especially with such a large catalog I'd really recommend doing a regular backup of your catalog file to another drive, at least whenever you did add some larger amount of movies. Never rely on the backup file (*.bak) alone, which AMC writes automatically, as you wouldn't be the first who loses a big part of your work when something goes wrong writing the catalog. It happened more than once.

I keep everything on Dropbox, to have a free, instant backup with amazing rollback features.. just in case...