Photo Mechanic Plus > Feature Requests

Auto scan for PM6 Plus

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shaneb:
Hello Kirk! I'd like to add some support for this idea per Andrew's suggestion. For me it would be ideal to ask photo mechanic to sync at a certain time of day. My workflow is below to help you understand how I use it.

So, I come back from an assignment, ingest my cards to the local working drive and then overnight (through chronosync) my computer (on 24/7) is scheduled to sync the drive to the corresponding folder on the server. This happens at 2am every night automatically. That means that I can access the information remotely, it is backed up and if I have dumped stuff from the road to the server, it shows up on the working drive as well.

Photo Mechanic Plus catalog is aimed at the individual folders on that server (one folder/one catalog per year so that I can turn off years/catalogs to speed the search if needed)

It would be super helpful if I could tell photo mechanic to sync the current year's folder at say 4am. That way the catalog is never more than 24 hours out of date.

On the idea of taxing the computer... it's doing the same amount of work, it's just doing it overnight and in smaller increments without me having to remember every couple months to sync.

Make sense? Happy to talk about it. But having auto sync (this could possibly be a standalone plugin that allows photo mechanic to be closed and it still operate) would really boost the idea of using PM+ in rigorous professional environments.

Thanks
Shane

AndyBell:
Sorry I'm late to the conversation as a new PM+ customer.

The Windows SDK has a function called ReadDirectoryChangesW that tracks changes to a folder and its contents... I don't know if MACs have an equiovalent as I don't program them.

The Windows function is difficult to work with and what it reports requires interpretation, but it removes the need to scan folders for changes. You 'just' start a thread that registers an interest in a folder and it waits until a change occurs. For image collections that have one primary folder, with subfolders containing the photos and defining the structure of the image collection, then registering an interest in the primary folder is enough.

A few years ago, I wrote a C++ app to monitor folders for changes to my images and, after a lot of trial and error, found this function to be the best way to do it in Windows. If the Mac SDK has a similar function then it might make this task doable for PM+.

From a Digital Asset Management perspective, automating things is desirable as it's easy to forget to add new and edit images to the catalogue, and re-scanning/syncing can be slow...

Andy

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