# Orthanc Explorer patient limit
**URL:** https://discourse.orthanc-server.org/t/orthanc-explorer-patient-limit/547
**Category:** Google Groups archive
**Created:** [November 20, 2016, 3:29am UTC](https://discourse.orthanc-server.org/t/orthanc-explorer-patient-limit/547 "2016-11-20T03:29:09Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@user8](https://discourse.orthanc-server.org/u/user8)
#### Post date: [November 20, 2016, 3:29am UTC](https://discourse.orthanc-server.org/t/orthanc-explorer-patient-limit/547/1 "2016-11-20T03:29:09Z")
Hi All,
I am using Orthanc as a hospital PACS and have faced a problem. When I open Orthanc's web Explorer with a list of patients... there are too many of them. And my browser downloads a start page with several hundrends of patients for 4-5 seconds. But when there are thousands of patients it would be impossible to use standart web interface. Is there some kind of options to limit the number of downloaded patients in Orthanc Explorer's patient list?
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### Author:  [@jodogne](https://discourse.orthanc-server.org/u/jodogne)
#### Post date: [November 24, 2016, 10:06am UTC](https://discourse.orthanc-server.org/t/orthanc-explorer-patient-limit/547/2 "2016-11-24T10:06:21Z")
Hello,
This topic is covered in the Orthanc Book:
> **[Orthanc Explorer is not user-friendly enough for my use — Orthanc Book ...](https://orthanc.uclouvain.be/book/faq/improving-interface.html)**
To summarize, the REST API of Orthanc _does_ allow to limit the number of patients that are retrieved [1], but the default Web interface called “Orthanc Explorer” does not exploit this feature. Indeed, Orthanc Explorer is a low-level administrative interface whose purpose is primarily to test the features of the REST API of Orthanc.
It is however definitely possible to create an alternative, more advanced user interface for Orthanc (either by creating a C/C++ plugin, or by serving a HTML/JavaScript Web application with the ServeFolders plugin). The free and open-source Orthanc project would _love_ to propose such an important improvement, but we need external contributors and/or funding to achieve this goal.
Sébastien-
[1] The “limit” and “since” flags allow to apply such a limit, as in the following command-line:
# curl ‘[http://localhost:8042/patients?limit=10&since=20](http://localhost:8042/patients?limit=10&since=20)’