[Shotwell] Dealing with large photo collections - start-up time

["a.gnome" <a gnome icewater org>]

I have about 23K photo files going back to 1999 under Shotwell's
management.  Even on an SSD,  it takes about 90 seconds for Shotwell to
become responsive after starting up, which sometimes makes it pretty
painful to use.

What strategies have you used to deal with large collections of photos,
while ensuring that all metadata (tags etc) are preserved?

I was thinking of maintaining a small "Current" library for photo
imports, initial organization, tagging, etc; and an "Archive" library
for older photos, but foresee problems moving photos from "Current" to
"Archive" as time goes on, especially with the metadata.

Are there plans to make Shotwell more capable when it comes to managing
large photo libraries?