Using Photo Mechanic With TIFF Film Scans

[charlesk]

I have looked at PM over the years because of its many recommendations; but as a long-time user of Lightroom Classic, I felt I could live without it. A year ago I moved from LR Classic to the Cloud version of Lightroom, thereby losing the Map module and its ability to geotag my photographs. I have not found any other application, including LR Classic, which is as good at geotagging as PM is; and so I bought it during the one-day half-price sale. That was my prime reason for purchasing it; but it enables me to add contact and copyright information, star ratings (not colour), and keywords to my photographs before importing into Lightroom. All good.

Now to my problem. With the covid pandemic and my living in a hot spot, I have taken almost no digital photographs in the past year. Instead I have been going through my film archives, creating digital contact sheets, and scanning single film strips from which I then crop out individual photographs. These photographs are tiff files of about 16.5MB in size. I can process only a few of them at a time in PM before it locks up on me and I have to use Task Manager to close it. Adobe Bridge has the same problem but can do a bit more before it locks up too. I am assuming that this has to do with having to update the tiff files with the added information from both PM and Bridge, not much smaller xmp sidecar files as would be the case with digital raw files. Of the two, I would prefer to use PM for processing these tiffs before importing them into Lightroom. Do you have any suggestions as to program settings or other procedures which could help me here?

[Kirk Baker]

Charles,

I have looked at PM over the years because of its many recommendations; but as a long-time user of Lightroom Classic, I felt I could live without it. A year ago I moved from LR Classic to the Cloud version of Lightroom, thereby losing the Map module and its ability to geotag my photographs. I have not found any other application, including LR Classic, which is as good at geotagging as PM is; and so I bought it during the one-day half-price sale. That was my prime reason for purchasing it; but it enables me to add contact and copyright information, star ratings (not colour), and keywords to my photographs before importing into Lightroom. All good.

Now to my problem. With the covid pandemic and my living in a hot spot, I have taken almost no digital photographs in the past year. Instead I have been going through my film archives, creating digital contact sheets, and scanning single film strips from which I then crop out individual photographs. These photographs are tiff files of about 16.5MB in size. I can process only a few of them at a time in PM before it locks up on me and I have to use Task Manager to close it. Adobe Bridge has the same problem but can do a bit more before it locks up too. I am assuming that this has to do with having to update the tiff files with the added information from both PM and Bridge, not much smaller xmp sidecar files as would be the case with digital raw files. Of the two, I would prefer to use PM for processing these tiffs before importing them into Lightroom. Do you have any suggestions as to program settings or other procedures which could help me here?

That sounds like a hardware problem to me.  Does your whole computer ever blue-screen?

The size of the files should simply make the operation take longer than other image formats, not cause an actual hang.

I can't think of any settings that would improve things.  I'd be happy to make a build that logs what it's doing while it updates the metadata so we can see where the problem occurs.  Let me know if you'd be willing to try.

-Kirk

[charlesk]

Hi, Kirk. Thanks for your response.

That sounds like a hardware problem to me.  Does your whole computer ever blue-screen?

Ah, the blue screen of death! When it was much more common people would write haiku about it. Some samples:

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that

To have no errors
Would be life without meaning
No struggle, no joy

Funny, Kirk, you should ask that, because, yes, I did have a blue screen sometime in the middle of last week. After it happened and I rebooted, nothing seemed right so I did a complete restore of my C drive from a backup I do every Monday. That put everything back to normal.

Since I wrote my posting yesterday morning I have learned and changed several things:

1. In my process of scanning a 35mm film strip and then cropping out the individual photographs, I discovered I was inadvertently changing my files from 16-bit greyscale to 16-bit sRGB, thereby increasing the file size. Once I corrected this problem, my files shrank from about 16.5MB to about 12.5MB.

2. Before I wrote my posting I had played around with the cache size in both PM and Adobe Bridge but to no apparent avail. Stupid me did not look at their locations. Yesterday afternoon I did. My system is on a smallish SSD, so there was no way I was going to get decent performance from either program with its cache at the default location. I immediately move both caches to a 4TB drive in my desktop and increased their sizes considerably. Given that I am processing tiff files, I set the PM cache at about 4000MB, double Camera Bits’ recommendation. Any suggestions here would be helpful.

3. When I do my weekly backup of my C drive (my data files are on other drives which are mirrored onto other external drives and whose contents are in various clouds), I always precede it with a chkdsk of the C drive. Normally everything is good, but yesterday I had disk errors which had to be fixed during a reboot. Once done and a second chkdsk was good, I did my backup. I cannot say if these disk errors occurred during my restore last week (in future I will do a chkdsk after any such restore) or as a result of my working in PM and Adobe Bridge with inadequately-sized caches.

I did some work in PM after all this, and things went much better. I did seem to have a lockup at some point when I did too much at once, but I can’t be sure. I am just starting to really use PM and have much to learn. I appreciate your suggestion of a special build, but at this point I would say “wait and see”. I will get back to you if problems persist. Thanks again.

Charles

[Kirk Baker]

Charles,

The disk cache size has no bearing on updating metadata in TIFF files.  The disk cache is used to store thumbnail and preview representations and speeds up browsing and previewing.

The Render Cache size will improve browsing of TIFF files significantly if you increase its size.  But it won't affect updating metadata in TIFF files (or any other image format.)

Let me know if the problems persist.

-Kirk

[charlesk]

The disk cache size has no bearing on updating metadata in TIFF files.  The disk cache is used to store thumbnail and preview representations and speeds up browsing and previewing.

The Render Cache size will improve browsing of TIFF files significantly if you increase its size.  But it won't affect updating metadata in TIFF files (or any other image format.)

Thanks, Kirk, for your response and the information provided. I have adjusted my preferences accordingly.

I suspect that my problems tie in with the other issues I mentioned in my response to your first posting. I will get back to you if these problems persist.

Charles