Currently different progress bars appear in different places. For instance the "load EXIF" progress bar is at center top, and the "visual previews" progress bar is under the visual preview box. It feels counter intuitive, and even though I'm a long-time user, I still get confused sometimes about what the software is doing. My proposed solution:

Put all progress bars in the same place.

Thanks!

Thanks for your feedback which I understand. But please let me explain, that the way it is today has been carefully thought through and has its reasons.
Basically there are two placese for progress bars:

On the top right above the table: here you will see all "active" processes that you start during the workflow and for whose you need to wait before continuing.

On the bottom left below the folders: batch processes that run in background independently of the workflow.

Additionally there is the visual preview generation, that doesn't have a real progress bar, instead you just see colors for the developed and undeveloped images under the preview. This is also something you usually don't need to wait for in the workflow, unless, of course you want to deflicker. I could think about bring up a progress bar for this above the table, but I find it more logical to just see which images have previews and which not. Also while deflickering it's interesting to see what exactly is going on instead of just having a progress bar that goes from left to right.

Gunther thank you so much for your quick, informative reply. The explanation that you gave, which I would describe as a function-workflow based placement of progress bars makes sense. One phrase in your reply feels illuminating to me "Also while deflickering it's interesting to see what exactly is going on." I'm guessing by this that you might stay in front of the software while it's working? I'm further guessing that we use the software in slightly different ways.

Typically my workflow is that I do my day job on one laptop, and LRTimelapse runs on another laptop to the side. Some of the operations take a long time (e.g. doing deflicker on 5000 60MB raw files). I'm usually trying to multitask, so almost never wait for a task to complete. For instance I've never watched the screen during deflickering! I will take on some other task, leave for lunch, overnight, etc. This means that I forget what's going on and where I was in the process. Sometimes I write myself a note.

Usually I want to look at the screen and have a clear idea if (1) what was just completed or in process, (2) if the computer is working or if I can do something again, and (3) what step I'm on next. I really like the visual workflow for that, but you can see that for someone who is multitasking (and likely not an expert user) it's a bit confusing to have the various progress bars. I'm not writing this to push the case, just letting you know how I use the software in practice.

Thank you also for the tip that I didn't need to do visual previews if I'm not doing deflicker. That will save me a lot of time!

P.S. I love LRTimelapse.

Of course I don't wait wathcing for each single process to complete :-)
I'd recommend that you watch my "Speed up editing multiple sequence" video to learn on how to significantly speed up your workflow when working that way using batch processes: https://lrtimelapse.com/tutorial/advanced/ (2nd video from the top).

Thank you for posting this. I'll check it out.