Photo Mechanic v5.0, build 18040 (9e75cf5), on late 2013 Mac Pro running macOS 10.12.3. Sierra.
I am sorting through some older files, mostly (at this time) NEF files from a Nikon D1x. They don't include a JPEG preview with these raw files, so when viewing Previews they normally are very low resolution. In order to judge the images (for those I think might be worth converting from NEF to TIFF) I will invoke the "(RAW)" view by pressing the q key.
A few minutes into viewing and previewing I seem to have accidentally quit the program in the middle of switching preview to preview (using the arrow keys to move between them). That happened twice, which felt very unusual for me to have somehow mis-pressed a key, but since the q was one I was using, I figured I must have brushed the command key, too.
I got tired of having to press the key so set the preference to always use the RAW file for the preview. It seemed that in that state, the app was still quitting mid-stream, but since I was no longer using the q key to invoke the RAW preview, I wondered if the app was flaking out. And that seems to have been the case. I would restart, load up a bunch (never a huge number — 100 or so) of files in a folder and start previewing and tagging. Then, boop! The app would just quit. No crash report, just gone. Try again, and after a while, boop!
So I switched back to the "must press q key" to invoke the RAW preview, but it would still blank out. Restart, keep working, boop! I began being more careful, to put a RAW-viewed preview back to low-rez so I wouldn't leave a bunch of RAW images maybe taking up RAM? To no avail.
Let's see: 64 GB of 1866 MHz DDR3 RAM on the Mac (3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5 processors with twin AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3072 MB of RAM for them). In PM I've set my Disk Cache to 100,000 MB, reserving at least 50,000, and have set the Memory Cache to 1024. I've not had this problem in the past, so I'm not thinking my settings are at fault. I've cold-booted the Mac, but it still flakes.
I'm trying to work through 126,000 images to cull down for a gallery show, but they weren't all shot with the D1x — the D2x and newer cameras pack a high-rez JPEG in with the NEF (built in, rather than as a separate file), so if the problem is, indeed, with using the RAW preview, the issue should become a non-issue when I start reviewing those newer files. (Indeed, most of the images were shot with newer cameras.)
Still, it's really odd to have any app just go away, no complaints from the OS or the app. Just…boop!
Questions? Comments? Suggestions?
Thanks,
Mark
