Problem with “Save Selected Photos” Dialog

[HartlBe]

I have updated to PhotoMechanic 5
It works fine

But there is still a problem that should be fixed…

I am a WeddingPhotographer located in Austria
And am using PhotoMechanic for selecting the good Shots
The selected shots will be processed in CaptureOne Pro 7
That workflow works fast and fine

The REST of the Shots are not given to the Client
But I want to give them a DVD with very small sized JPG Files of all the other shots so that they can find images they miss in my selection…
That is why I select this unprocessed Files in PhotoMechanic and use the “Save Selected Photos” Dialog to save that RAW-Files to a very small JPG-File

But here are two problems

the “Save Selected Photos” Dialog blocks the entire application.
When I want to save 3500RAW-Files to a 600x400 JPG it consumes a lot of time and blocks the whole application
It would be MUCH better if that was a job that runs like the FTP-JOB not blocking the Application

The second problem with the “Save Selected Photos” Dialog is when it comes to an error with a single image the whole process stops and a messagebox is displayed
All the images after that “error”-image are skipped and I have to find out what images have been processed and what images miss
That’s NOT good at all


Please think about implementing the “Save Selected Photos” Dialog as a parallel job with a decent error-handling

Thank you

Bernhard Hartl

[Kirk Baker]

Bernhard,

In order to make something like the Save dialog not block the application, it would necessitate either having a way for you to be unable to work with the images in the contact sheet (moving, renaming, deleting, doing anything that would write back to those files would have to be prohibited) or the images would have to be copied to a separate location (that's what the uploaders do) so that you cannot modify the files.

The Save dialog accomplishes both of these (without copying any files) by blocking you from doing anything in the app until it completes.

Copying the files would be the safest way (right now we can't prevent you from switching out of PM and modifying the selected files with the OS or some other app) but would potentially be a problem because your hard drive may not have enough space to duplicate the files (it could also take some time to do the copying and that copy process would also be modal just like it is for the uploaders).

As for the error reporting, do you have any suggestions as to what would help you fix the problem that caused the error and would allow you to try again more quickly?

-Kirk

[HartlBe]

Hello Kirk
I don’t think it in necessary to copy all the RAW-files to another location.
It would be enough to write an error-note for every error that happens while processing the files. When one file is deleted while PM5 works on extracting the JPG's a simple note is enough.
When one file isn’t readable or something else happens - one simple error-note is enough.
After that note PM5 should try to go on processing the next file of the process-file-list
The Notes can be written to a ErrorFile that is located in the ExportDirectory where all the JPG-Files are going to…
that is how I would program that it if I could edit PM5’s source ...

Bernhard

[Kirk Baker]

Bernhard,

I don’t think it in necessary to copy all the RAW-files to another location.

Actually, it has to be done in one of the two ways that I described.  Any other method that would allow access to files that are in use by the Save process would invite disaster.

It would be enough to write an error-note for every error that happens while processing the files. When one file is deleted while PM5 works on extracting the JPG's a simple note is enough.

What is this deleting that you're talking about?

When one file isn’t readable or something else happens - one simple error-note is enough.
After that note PM5 should try to go on processing the next file of the process-file-list
The Notes can be written to a ErrorFile that is located in the ExportDirectory where all the JPG-Files are going to…
that is how I would program that it if I could edit PM5’s source ...

This also is a problem.  If you were to use a sequence number in your naming of your destination files, they would all get out of sync and you would not only have to get these 'errored' files reprocessed, you would also have to do another separate rename after the save completes.

PM cannot just proceed with the other files.  Your destination disk may be full and continuing to process files would be fruitless.  I can change the Save As to report the name of the file that that got the error, and additionally, remove the selection on the files that completed, then you could correct the problem and open Save As again and continue where you left off.

If Save As were to operate in the background, what other work in Photo Mechanic would you try to do?

-Kirk