Issues following injesting to wrong drive.

[Skids]

Hi,

I recently added a second physical SSD to store my images.  My set up is to store images based on capture date with pre 2024 on the old drive and 2024 onwards on the new.  At the moment I use a single Photomechanic catalogue to manage my image collection.

I injested images from an SD card that held a mixture of previously injested and never injested image files.  Owing to an error on my part the images were added to the pre-2024 drive despite them being taken in 2024.  The injest process added a new year folder, 2024, to the pre-2024 drive and all the images on the SD card were copied to the drive in error.

I spotted my error as some images were duplicated and were missing IPTC data.  I simply used PhotoMechanic to navigate to the 2024 year folder on the wrong drive and deleted it.  Next, I located and corrected my error in the injest settings and re-ran the injest process.  The injest completed very quickly and no images were injested.  I tried a second time but the result was the same. 

Looking at the SD card I noted that Photomechanic had created a hidden text file that contains a single line which I believe to be a UUID ( a long unique random number never likely to be repeated).  I contemplated deleting this file but was concerned that doing so would cause all the images to be imported whereas I only wanted those that were not already in the catalogue to be added.  In the end I manually imported the images I wanted based on date searched and all is now well.

I'm curious how PhotoMechanic uses hidden files to prevent images from being added twice to its database.  The difficulty in preventing duplicates in the catalogue is that the source images are quite likely to have different names to those stored on the target storage drives.  Is PhotoMechanic storing original file names?  Also, what would have happened had I deleted the hidden file from the SD card and then injested the images, would duplicates have been created?  Lastly what happens if the SD card is write protected?

best wishes

Simon

[ahoward]

I'm curious how PhotoMechanic uses hidden files to prevent images from being added twice to its database.

The identifier in that file has a corresponding file in `~/Library/Caches/Photo Mechanic/ingest/incremental`. That file has the name (one the card), size, and capture time of every image that gets ingested. If you try another ingest, and an image matches up with those 3 attributes, Photo Mechanic will not ingest it. It does only prevents Ingesting that image, it does not prevent that image from being added to a catalog.

Is PhotoMechanic storing original file names?

Yes. You can open up the matching file in the folder I mentioned above. Its just a text file;

 

Also, what would have happened had I deleted the hidden file from the SD card and then injested the images, would duplicates have been created?

Yes. If .pmingest.dat doesn't exist when Ingest begins, it will be created.

Lastly what happens if the SD card is write protected?

I believe you get an error or possibly the option to continue without creating the file.