Minor irriatation with incremental ingest

[jwvaughn]

When I am on the road, I do incremental ingests to my laptop, when home, I do the same to my desktop. The problem is that I don't format my cards right away so there may very well be pictures on them that have been ingested to the other machine plus new stuff.

Here is the problem, the incremental ingest does all the pictures when the last ingest was on the other machine.

From what I can glean, the file .pmingest.dat on the cards has some info demarcating old and new.  When I peeked at it's contents, I suspect a registry (mis)match going on which would explain why the problem is occurring.

Is there sane work-around for this other than using the same machine for ingest all the time?

Jerry

Windows XP and Photo Mechanic 4.6

[Kirk Baker]

Jerry,

When I am on the road, I do incremental ingests to my laptop, when home, I do the same to my desktop. The problem is that I don't format my cards right away so there may very well be pictures on them that have been ingested to the other machine plus new stuff.

Here is the problem, the incremental ingest does all the pictures when the last ingest was on the other machine.

From what I can glean, the file .pmingest.dat on the cards has some info demarcating old and new.  When I peeked at it's contents, I suspect a registry (mis)match going on which would explain why the problem is occurring.

Is there sane work-around for this other than using the same machine for ingest all the time?

The .pmingest.dat file is an identifier that PM uses to look up in a list of identifiers for the list of files that have been ingested on that system for a given identifier.  Since your two systems don't share that data, they don't know that the other system has ingested a particular set of files.

So if you never want a particular set of files to be ingested twice then you'll either have to remove the files after ingest so the second machine doesn't see them, or you'll always have to ingest on one system.

May I ask why you wouldn't want the entire set of files that are ingested to be the same on both systems?

-Kirk

[jwvaughn]

The .pmingest.dat file is an identifier that PM uses to look up in a list of identifiers for the list of files that have been ingested on that system for a given identifier.  Since your two systems don't share that data, they don't know that the other system has ingested a particular set of files.

So if you never want a particular set of files to be ingested twice then you'll either have to remove the files after ingest so the second machine doesn't see them, or you'll always have to ingest on one system.

May I ask why you wouldn't want the entire set of files that are ingested to be the same on both systems?

-Kirk

As I said, I don't consider it a bug, just a minor irritation. I could format the cards more often or delete the downloaded files but, I have a inherent prejudice against doing so.

Ad for keeping the entire set on both machines... Well, the desktop had nearly 3 terabytes of backup storage attached and it has a CRT, which I find way better than any LCD screen for editing.  When I ingest, I also create the file structure I use. Finally, I delete the obvious bad stuff.  If on the laptop, that entire structure, original and working directories, gets copied to the desktop.  If I did another ingest, I would at a minimum have to go through and delete again.

Last, I only keep really current projects and a folder of my favorites on the laptop.  The desktop has a larger history that I keep on the local drive.  All related to the amount of storage available on the machines.

Screwy perhaps, but it does work for me.

Jerry

[Kirk Baker]

Jerry,

The .pmingest.dat file is an identifier that PM uses to look up in a list of identifiers for the list of files that have been ingested on that system for a given identifier.  Since your two systems don't share that data, they don't know that the other system has ingested a particular set of files.

So if you never want a particular set of files to be ingested twice then you'll either have to remove the files after ingest so the second machine doesn't see them, or you'll always have to ingest on one system.

May I ask why you wouldn't want the entire set of files that are ingested to be the same on both systems?

As I said, I don't consider it a bug, just a minor irritation. I could format the cards more often or delete the downloaded files but, I have a inherent prejudice against doing so.

Ad for keeping the entire set on both machines... Well, the desktop had nearly 3 terabytes of backup storage attached and it has a CRT, which I find way better than any LCD screen for editing.  When I ingest, I also create the file structure I use. Finally, I delete the obvious bad stuff.  If on the laptop, that entire structure, original and working directories, gets copied to the desktop.  If I did another ingest, I would at a minimum have to go through and delete again.

Last, I only keep really current projects and a folder of my favorites on the laptop.  The desktop has a larger history that I keep on the local drive.  All related to the amount of storage available on the machines.

Screwy perhaps, but it does work for me.

I guess we'll have to leave it at that since the only way we could make it so that files would never be ingested twice, no matter how many computers participated in the incremental ingests would be to store the history on the card itself and that would eventually fill the card up with history data!  Just not a workable solution.

-Kirk

[jwvaughn]

I think there ways around it but at the cost of performance and I prefer better performance.

{soap box on}
Until Fred Greaves turned me on to Photo Mechanic, I never was happy with any method I tried for downloading pictures off my cards.  Fred also mentioned that you guys had great support and he was right!

A big thanks from me for both your support and Photo Mechanic.
{soap box off}

Jerry