Comment 51 for bug 596327

I'm imagining.... It would be much faster, wouldn't it? ;-)

I could always just hit the refresh key when I am interested in
an update.

I have found a slightly easier way around this. If I leave on the
modification time stamp updates (which is what I want), I can avoid
the long waits by selecting an album, clicking "Album" -> "Write
Metadata to Images" and then, once the job starts, selecting a
different album folder and waiting. I did that and it took 4.5 mins
to update 935 files. The file-watching and scanning only seems to
apply to the album currently being viewed, so viewing a different
album from the one where the metadata changes are under way seems to
avoid the issue.

I prefer to wait in the second album, because if I start a second
job to update the metadata, the progress of the first job cannot be
monitored any more. Once the second job completes, the progress bar
is cleared even though I can still hear the disk thrashing away on
the first job (and see the time stamps changing on the files from
the console). Maybe you could integrate the progress with the KDE
notifications widgets that can track several jobs at once (like in
the Dolphin file manager).