Redesigning the lighttable and the mipmap cache

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Between January 2022 and March 2026, Ansel landed 297 non-merge commits regarding the lighttable grid, its thumbnails, and their rendering pipeline and caching. I tried to make do with the scruffy Darktable lighttable code, only degreased, for as long as I could but unfortunately, it was pure technical debt and it was painfully slow.

Indeed, Darktable “manages” the crappiness of its lighttable by reducing its size: the left and right side panels take a lot of display surface, which leaves even less area for the lighttable to repaint. Since Ansel removed the right side panel, merging its content with the left one and the global menu, there was more surface to paint, more CPU work to do, and the terrible design of the lighttable became all the more harmful.

Performance on Ansel

Redesigning the lighttable and the mipmap cache