Impact Statement: In some operating systems, PM will delay opening the Ingest window for 15-30 seconds when CTRL-G is pressed, because it's trying to connect to drive mappings that are inaccessible on the user's current LAN. This slows down ingesting photos on deadline, and my understanding is that it happens every time CTRL-G is pressed.
Use Case: User has mappings to network drives on the user's home LAN (10.x.x.x IP addresses). These drives are not exposed to the Internet. When user is working off-site & connected to the venue's media LAN, these drive mappings are inaccessible. PM tries to connect to them every time CTRL-G is pressed and times out, which delays opening of the Ingest window. The .PMIngestIgnore root folder workaround does not address this scenario because PM can't connect to the drive to see if the "ignore" folder exists.
New Feature Suggestion: Create a user-configurable list of drives that are "allowed" for PM ingest operations. PM will validate connectivity to these drives per existing functionality; the enhancement is that PM will ignore any other drive mappings that may exist, for purposes of the Ingest dialog. Example: the user's local drive is C:, and their card readers are always mapped to D: and E:. They could put drives C-D-E on the "AllowList" for ingests, which tells PM to ignore all other drive mappings. Presumably, this would make the Ingest dialog more responsive when working off-site with inaccessible drive mappings.
Alternatives:
1) Scripts to Map & Unmap Drives: In the case of Windows, the user could create "net use" scripts to un-map drives that will be inaccessible when they're working off-site, and then re-map them when they're back at their home base. This workaround is technically viable, but I'd prefer not to be bouncing drive mappings every time I cover an event just to speed up PM Ingest.
2) Map network drives with HostName instead of IP address. For example, let's say the user has drive "N:" mapped to a NAS drive on their home network via the server's IP address (N: \\10.0.0.nnn\root). User could change this mapping to use the server hame (HostName) instead of the IP address (N:\\HostName\root). The latter mapping would use DNS to resolve HostName, which may yield faster responses than trying to connect to a 10-net address that probably exists on the venue's media LAN, but obviously isn't the intended destination. I haven't tested this yet to see the results as it relates to PM Ingest performance.
3) Expose Drives to the Internet: The user could also expose these drives to the Internet, but this would expand their attack surface.
Technical Details:
Photo Mechanic 2025.1 build 7955 (966971f)
Windows 10 Pro build 10.0.19045
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen6
Thank you for considering this idea.
