Persistent crashes when zooming, paging...

[harvey@croze.net]

Greetings,

Getting persistent crashes in the process of zooming and stepping through a contact sheet. It appears to be triggered by trying to page through a number of zoomed images.  Suddenly the contact sheet window (but not the marginal thumbnails) goes blank, and after a couple of beats the programme crashes. No error message either from app or system.

Originally thought it was because I was looking at large batches of camera trap images (keeping batch to under 10,000 after a warning), but the problem occurs even with much smaller contacts.  But, oddly, I started going through quite a number of 9,000+ batches with no problem. The issue started suddenly.

Have tried downloading, installing and launching the application afresh, but the problem persists.

Reluctant to fiddle with cache size until I get some comforting expert advice. I note that you have recommended to another ‘Persistent Crasher’ to reset preferences. But you only point to a set of Windows steps. Again, would rather have your advice before trying it on the Mac.

I’m running PM 5.0, build 18040 (9e75cf5) in Sierra v.10.12.2 on a 27” iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015), 3.3 GHz Intel Core i5,  8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3, AMD Radeon R9 M395 2048MB.  The 2 Tb HD has 680Gb free.

With thanks, standing by….    Harvey

[Kirk Baker]

Harvey,

Please try this unofficial build:

http://www.camerabits.com/download/PhotoMechanic5R18107.dmg

It should address the problem you're having on macOS Sierra.

-Kirk

[harvey@croze.net]

Hi, Kirk,
As if by magic, it worked! Using the new build I just ran through a batch of 1,400 images, zooming in and out to identify species, and it worked smoothly throughout.
Can you tell us what happened, when you get a chance?
Many thanks for keeping your amazing piece of software on the top of the list of most useful apps.
Rgds, Harvey

[Kirk Baker]

As if by magic, it worked! Using the new build I just ran through a batch of 1,400 images, zooming in and out to identify species, and it worked smoothly throughout.
Can you tell us what happened, when you get a chance?
Many thanks for keeping your amazing piece of software on the top of the list of most useful apps.

The new macOS Sierra has bugs in it.  The particular bug in macOS Sierra that was responsible for the problem you experienced causes the various "split views" to spontaneously resize to illegal sizes (think of a box being turned inside-out).  Apple provides this split view (NSSplitView) object for developers to use to make resizable panes inside of windows.  PM uses a number of them in the Contact Sheet window and in the Preview window.  When they would spontaneously resize this would cause the preview to request unusually large sized images to be requested from the cache system, which for a while would be honored, but eventually available memory would be exhausted and PM would crash.

What I did to fix this was to abandon the use of Apple's split view and wrote my own split view system from scratch and replaced all instances of Apple's split view with my own.  We couldn't wait for a fix from Apple (sometimes our bug reports are never resolved) so we made an effort to work around their problems and what you have now is the result.

What I'd like Apple to do is put the brakes on the new macOS releases and concentrate on making very solid updates to the OS instead of trying to jam as many features into the OS each year.  It would make our lives easier as developers and stable software makes users happy too.

Thanks for the kind words!

-Kirk