Scanning for plug-ins at startup….VERY SLOW

RR
Posted By
Robert_Rock
Nov 6, 2003
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1860
Replies
15
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Closed
Photoshop CS seems to take FOREVER to load. It shows "Scanning for plug-ins…" at the start up which seems to take so long. I have a very fast machine, so it is not my computer (Pentium4-3Ghz, 2Gb RAM, ATI Radeon 9800XT-256Mb, etc…). The only "large" plug-ins I have are AutoFX Dream Suite 1 & 2 and Mystical Lighting, Genuine Fractals. But I had these same plug-ins with 7.0 and it used to load VERY quickly. Any ideas out there?

Thanks,
Bob

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Mark_Siegel
Nov 6, 2003
Others have noted that AutoFX Photographic Edges causes PSCS to take a VERY long time to load. Do you use this? Or perhaps your other AutoFx plugin is to blame.

MarkS
RR
Robert_Rock
Nov 6, 2003
Thanks Mark. I do not have "Photographic Edges", but the other 3 AutoFX plug-ins could possibly be contributing to the slow-down. But that doesn’t explain why my startup was very quick with 7.0 and earlier. I even tried changing the folder to a custom plug-ins folder for these larger plug-ins but to no avail. Also completely re installed PSCS from scratch, and re installed the plug-ins, but again to no avail. It seems to scan the "presets" very quickly, but takes forever with the plug-ins. I’ll keep playing around with it to see if I can stumble onto a solution. Thanks very much for your reply.

Bob Rock
JH
Jake_Hannam
Nov 6, 2003
Robert,

I have AutoFX and Genuine Fractals running under CS without any problmes. One thing you need to be sure of is that you are NOT having CS refer to the 7.0 plugins directory (there was a warning about that in the readme file). Photoshop will find two versions of the same plugin and might choke or error out.

I just copied the AutoFX folder (more than just the .8bf file) to my CS plugins folder. I had to search a bit but I was able to copy the PrintGF.8bf (Genuine Fractals) file to the corresponding folder in CS. Any plugin that had its own folder in 7.0 I just copied to the corresponding location in CS.

It is possible that your registry has a bad reference to one of your plugins. If simply copying the folders doesn’t work, try uninstalling the plugins and then reinstalling them into the CS plugins folder. By the way, some plugins have to be installed into a specific subfolder (e.g. Photoshop Only, Filters, Import-Export, etc.) rather than just the root Plugins folder. Check the readme that comes with the plugins for the specifics.

Maybe this will help, I hope.

Jake
RR
Robert Rock
Nov 7, 2003
Thanks Jake. I’ll look further into this tomorrow. I have just completed removing ALL references to PS 7.0 from the registry, since I no longer have it installed, but it’s no faster. So there is no problem of attempting to direct to old 7.0 plugin folders. But I’m wondering now if I should follow your advice and uninstall all 3rd party plugins again and then reinstall. Perhaps in combination with what I’ve already done, it may work this time. I’ll keep you posted and thanks again so much for taking the time to help.

Bob
RR
Robert Rock
Nov 7, 2003
Jake,
To further this issue, as I mentioned earlier, I have installed all 3rd party plugins (AutoFX and Genuine Fractals) into a different plugins folder other than the default PSCS folder. This morning I simply unchecked the "add’l plugins folder" in the preferences and it now loads instantly. So, we know that the delay is in loading these plugins. But is this normal? Should it take almost a minute or so to scan these plugins? That seems awfully long to me and I don’t recall this delay previously. Do you still think that uninstalling and reinstalling them will still help? Obviously my workaround would be to simply recheck the alternate plugins folder again whenever I wish to use them, and restart PSCS…but I’m just very curious now to see if there’s another way to fix this. Any add’l thoughts are most welcome and appreciated.

Bob
JH
Jake_Hannam
Nov 7, 2003
Bob,

If the delay is only a minute, I wouldn’t worry about it. PS 7 and CS both take 20-40 seconds during startup on my 1.9G P4 with 512MB memory. To me that is okay. I know that the more fonts you have on your system and the more plugins you have, the longer it will take.

Maybe there is a problem with the additional plugins check box? I don’t have it checked in mine because I simply copied all the 3rd party plugins and/or folders to the PSCS Plugins folder. Again, if it’s a minute or less with no error messages, I wouldn’t worry about it. Also, since you’ve already uninstalled and reinstalled, you shouldn’t have to do that again — I wouldn’t.

Jake
AB
Andrew_Bokelman
Nov 7, 2003
There is another way for Photoshop to use third party plugins. Don’t tell Photoshop to look in the remote folder, but instead create a shortcut to that remote folder in the Photoshop Plugin folder.

If, on the other hand, this remote folder is being used by another version of Photoshop and duplicates the CS plugins, create individual shortcuts that point only to the third-party subfolders or files.

I don’t have CS yet, but with PS7 I have several shortcuts in the plugin folder that point elsewhere, and it all works.
JH
Jake_Hannam
Nov 7, 2003
" … instead create a shortcut to that remote folder in the Photoshop Plugin folder"

D’oh! I knew that but had forgotten. That is the sensible way to do it (and that’s probably why it didn’t occur to me). It certainly makes more sense from a disk space perspective if you are going to keep both 7 and CS on the computer.

Thanks, Andrew.
RR
Robert Rock
Nov 8, 2003
BINGO. Thanks Andrew, and you too Jake. That worked like a charm. Now I have all my slow loading large plugins installed into a separate folder, with only a tiny 1kb shortcut file in the PSCS default plugin directory. It loads up instantly like they weren’t even there, and the plugins are still instantly accesable within PS. Thanks again for such an obvious speed tip. One of the PhotoShop guru’s should put this in their next book.

Again, my thanks.

Bob
JH
Jake_Hannam
Nov 8, 2003
I’m glad Andrew could help (sigh).

Jake
CC
Chris_Cox
Nov 9, 2003
Photoshop shouldn’t be taking more than 30 seconds to launch, even cold.

Make sure you move the non-plugin files out of the plugins folder (that includes the settings and content files that some plugins install).
AB
Andrew_Bokelman
Nov 9, 2003
BINGO. Thanks Andrew, and you too Jake.

I’m glad this helped. And it looks like I’m going to have to do some work on my setup. I just loaded PS CS and it’s taking 10 seconds for the plugins to scan. I guess I can’t complain about 10 seconds, but it feels like a speed bump after PS 7, which took less than 2 seconds to scan plugins.

Right now I have a slew of shortcuts pointing to individual subfolders and files under PS 7. I’m going to try putting them all in one place with one shortcut.
RR
Robert Rock
Nov 9, 2003
Chris,
Thanks for your feedback. Andrew’s solution solved the problem. With the shortcut technique of redirecting to my custom plugins folder, I’m completely loaded up in PSCS in about 8 seconds flat! I can live with that. It was taking me about 40-45 seconds previously. This was unacceptable for those files which I prefer to double click and open directly in PS each time. I was always previously using an alternate quicker program for quick browsing and viewing of images as a default (ACDSee, for example). But now I can use PS for everything, which is my preference anyway.

Thanks to all, especially you Andrew.

Bob
JH
Jake_Hannam
Nov 9, 2003
Never having actually timed it before (I estimated less than a minute in my original post), I went ahead and timed how long it took PSCS to load on my P4 1.9G with 512MB PC800 memory.

From the time I clicked the PSCS icon to the ‘welcome screen’, it took 15 seconds (including scanning of presets, fonts, and plugins).
By way of comparison, it took 7 seconds for PS 7.01. I don’t think that is significant.

PSCS would probably load even faster if I removed (as Chris suggested) all the uninstalls, readmes, and HTML files that some plugins insist on installing in their folders. And, I’m sure, it would have been faster had I had a faster P4.

For what it’s worth …

Jake
RK
Ronald_Keller
Nov 10, 2003
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