Background Image slows screen updating

[Sheldon Cooper]

I use scanned track plans to help design my layouts, but adding and editing track elements is incredibly slow when the image layer is visible. Is this a known problem and is there a workaround?

[RailModeller Support]

Hi Sheldon,

best to get in touch with support (Help > Send Email to Support) and include the layout in question so we can have a look!

Cheers,
Jan

[Sheldon Cooper]

The problem seems to be the image resolution. If it's too high the memory used by RM makes refreshing slow. My scanned images were at 300 dpi, so I used a graphics editor to rescale it to 30 dpi and the response is far better - at the expense of having a coarser image.

[RailModeller Support]

The problem seems to be the image resolution.

One thing to look out for is the file size of your layout (either via Document > Layout Info or in the Finder). When editing the layout macOS will frequently create backups of the document and depending on the speed of the Mac and in particular the disk drive this can significantly slow down the workflow.

In this case resizing the image with Preview or an image editing app before importing the image into RailModeller Pro often helps.

Hope this helps,
Jan