Problem external HDD's

KLE74PP

I’ve been using “TonFotos” for about six weeks now, since Picasa is no longer around and this tool comes close to it. However (and I have the paid version), I have to wonder: how could anyone program something like this?

If you import an external HDD (Drive D🙂 without facial recognition—just to speed things up—it still takes days of non-stop processing. Fair enough, there are 460,000 files on that one drive—that’s fine.
But in the “Folders” view, they aren’t categorized by drive name. This makes it difficult to figure out which drive needs to be connected. (As an avid amateur photographer and sports club photojournalist, I accumulate a lot of images every year, so I use multiple external drives!)
Instead, all the drives are lumped together regardless of the drive letter (D, E, F, etc.) they were assigned, and without showing the drive’s actual name.
Furthermore, if you try to import another drive that Windows happens to assign the letter “D” to again, the software gets overwhelmed because it doesn’t realize it’s a different drive!?! WHY isn’t it filed and saved under the drive’s specific identifier? (Model, manufacturer, serial number—any of these would work if the drive letter isn’t an option?!)

And then there was the time I removed a drive from the import list—everything associated with it vanished—and when I plugged it back in to import it again, the whole process started from scratch. Even though the “ini files” were still on the drive, etc.!?!

The way it handles importing and managing external hard drives is absolutely poorly thought out!!!! There’s no real help available for this either, other than “connect the drive, go to File > Storage Locations, and click Done.” You can’t manually trigger or cancel further scanning here, either. Now—even though it shows up as a storage location—the drive doesn’t appear in the folder structure at all, and it isn’t being scanned…

Question: How do you guys solve this problem? Is there actually a solution for this? And how do you get in touch with the programmers so they can fix it!?

Thanks for your support!
Sunny regards, KLE

Andrey

KLE74PP Please let me try to explain.

First, drive letters. This is worst possible identifier for a drive. You can’t control how Windows will assign drive letters to your extermal drives. If it was once mounted as D there is absolutely no guarantee no other drive will be mounted to the same letter and (even it happens to be free) your drive will be mounted as D again. And honestly, if you have for example 5 external drives, do you even remember which drive letter each one was last time you plugged it in? I doubt this.

For that reason Tonfotos does not rely on drive letter at all. Instead, it remembers all important information about drive it has access to - size, type, name (if it has one), volume label, FS type and so on. And then in will identify your drive again regardless of the drive letter Windows feels like to assign today.

Same approach works for shared drive. Instead of drive letter, Tonfotos identifies shared drives by their UNC path. Tonfots will identify your drive again if you will reassign it to other drive letter.

The challenge is though, Windows has limitations. You can’t access hard drive ID, unlike Mac OS for example. And most of the drives don’t even have one, to be fair. You can only rely on some secondary attributes as I described. If you have several different external drives, like most of the people - you will be fine. However, if you happen to buy 5 identical ones, format them with the same blank volume label, then you have a problem. There is just no way for the application to tell one from another. They are identical. So you MUST at least set different volume labels.

I understand you had poor experience so far, but I am afraid I can’t tell you what exactly went wrong as there is so little details you provided. Even though this function works for most people, there is no 100% guarentee there are no bug we still did not find. So if you can provide step by step description of the problem I will try to help.