Why is image processing so slow compared to Microsoft Office?

[pirast]

Hi, I am using the latest version of LibreOffice on my Core i3 with 4GB of RAM and Windows 8 x64.
When I import a picture being 11MB of size to impress (i.e. http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ALV_NOK_2__20130702_09_55_07_Pro__highres.jpg), it takes really long (approx 20 seconds) to process. When I decide to rotate it, it takes another 10 seconds until that action is completed (meanwhile, LibreOffice is not responding whatsover).

Compared to that, with Microsoft Office 2013 (and even Office XP) this actions only take 1-2 seconds.

I’ve already set the graphics-cache to 200MB without any change.

Is there any way to speed image processing up?

[L-user]

I don’t know why this takes so long… but main purpose of presentation software is editing images. I always edit image (e.g. rotate) in image editor, make sure that image is as small as possible and then import in presentation program like Impress.

[oweng]

Bug tdf#47148 is the general report that explains why image handling is so bad. It is a known problem inherited from the original OOo code. The developers are aware of the situation and are working to improve the code, but this is a large and old issue. It will take time.

Bug tdf#52433 is an example of bad memory leaking. has been fixed for v4.2.5.2 and v4.3.

EDIT: In addition to the image caching bug listed above (which is being worked on as I write this) the recent fix to tdf#97662 in relation to JPEG and PNG compression efficiency should noticably improve both performance and output quality.

[L-user]

We can safety assume this bugs are not going to be fixes anytime soon. So I still suggest to make image editing in image editor and not in Impress. This also makes much less pain if document is opened in e.g.MS-PowerPoint and for some reason all of the “image editing features” created in Impress are not interpreted correctly. But on the other hand if image is edited in image editing software then presentation tool just opens image without needing to add extra actions e.g. rotate, scale down etc.