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.

KLE74PP

Thank you for your quick response.

I understand the point about drive letters. That is why I assumed that at least the drive label—i.e., the title—would be read and displayed as such (e.g., “Photo HDD - Business” or “Photo SSD - Private,” if I had named the drive that way). Instead, it just says “Network Disk.” With multiple drives, you have to click through them to find the right one. It’s a shame the title isn’t included and displayed, especially since, as you noted, Windows tends to change drive letters.

Now, as you can see in the screenshot, I had already scanned several drives (D, E, F)—yet they are no longer visible in the “Folders” view??? There is NO “Network Disk” listed???

There is no option to manually “trigger” a specific hard drive—such as Drive D (shown in the screenshot)—to resume indexing or to make it appear… I don’t know if or when the tool intends to continue scanning the drive. Furthermore, I had already scanned Drive D, and a good 300,000 images had been indexed. Then, nothing happened for a while; the screen/application had frozen, and I accidentally clicked the “minus” button in the storage location management window—that’s the only explanation I have—because once the window became responsive again, Drive D was gone.
When I added it back using the “plus” button, it showed up—as you can see—with ZERO data, and nothing is being scanned. Even though the .ini files are still on the drive. The drive—as shown in the screenshots—does not appear in the “Folders” structure at all—nothing shows up?!?

That is the reason for my confusion and my request for help!
My question is: Can I manually trigger the scanning—or indexing—process, and if so, how?

Thank you very much for your assistance!

Andrey

KLE74PP That is why I assumed that at least the drive label—i.e., the title—would be read and displayed as such (e.g., “Photo HDD - Business” or “Photo SSD - Private,”

Can you please clarify what exaclty you mean by drive label? Is it “Volume label” (file system attribute) or what? And what is “Network Disk”, where does it come from? It defintiely comes from somewhere.

KLE74PP Now, as you can see in the screenshot, I had already scanned several drives (D, E, F)—yet they are no longer visible in the “Folders” view??? There is NO “Network Disk” listed??? We need to figure out this before we can undestand what is actually wrong.

That means last time program scanned contents of those drives it saw exactly zero files that it can show. Program just does not display empty folders or even drives.

KLE74PP There is no option to manually “trigger” a specific hard drive—such as Drive D (shown in the screenshot)—to resume indexing or to make it appear…

There is, but only when it is not empty. However, every time you plug it back it, it will be scanned. Once in a while program does full scan of everything it has access to, you can consider it as every start. However, after scanning is done, program switches on to monitoring mode - it will get notifications from Windows every time someting changes, so it does not need to scan. However, if you restart it, it does not know what happened when it was off, so it will have to scan again.

KLE74PP

Well, “Network Disk” is what the program displays for me—see the screenshot.
Yes, by “drive label” I meant the name of the external hard drive—the one shown in Windows, or the name I can assign to the drive within Windows.

After restarting the computer several times, disconnecting the drives, and relaunching the program with just one hard drive (D🙂 connected, the scanning process finally started up again. Although the other drives are now appearing as “storage locations” again (see screenshot, Drive F, etc.), the images themselves aren’t showing up in the folders on those drives.

What puzzles me is this: I’ve spent several hours letting it scan Drive D again. It has already detected and imported over 11,000 images from that drive into the first folder, yet the display (see screenshot) still shows everything at “0”—even though a total of well over 120,000 images have actually been imported by now.
The top part of the screen doesn’t show details about the storage media, though the bottom section indicates that an “automatic” scan is underway. However, it doesn’t show how many images are left to process; it has simply said “A few seconds remaining” for hours now.

It’s great that the tool constantly checks for and adds new files. However, it would be helpful to see an indicator showing how many images from the drive have already been imported versus how many are still pending.
After all, it understandably takes quite a long time to import 400,000 images from a USB 3.0 hard drive. As I said, it would simply be helpful if the drives were displayed as “D:/Drive Name”—since they currently show up just as “Network Disk,” you can’t tell from the folder view which drive contains specific folders. If you have multiple drives, it’s really inconvenient…
Yes, Windows assigns the drive letters, but the user assigns the drive names. And those names rarely, if ever, change while the drives are in use.

The tool is really good and functional. However, regarding the overview and the scanning process—it’s not very helpful for identification purposes. Also, if the drives aren’t connected, the images don’t appear in the folder structure either (e.g., Drive F, which I had scanned; see the screenshot—it just says “Path does not exist” with “Network Disk” as the name)…
This means the images that were already scanned (407,615 files—processed over several days) aren’t displayed.

That’s my issue with scanning hard drives: they take days to scan, but then—as soon as you swap the drive—the thumbnails and such no longer show up, possibly because a new drive letter gets assigned upon reconnection. But I don’t know which drive it was, because it just says “Network Disk”—there’s no drive label displayed?!?

Andrey

KLE74PP Honestly, I am very confused. I understand you are too, but for me to able to help I need to unerstand what is actrually going on. For that reason I would suggest just not discussing your improvement suggestions at this point. It is like discussing “My car is totalled, and I press start engine button and it does not start. My suggestion is that engine should start when I press it.” Hope you get what I mean. Let us first figure out the basics.

First of all, as ar as I understand your drives are USB drives, correct? However, for some reason program detects them as network drives. This is not at all how it supposed to be, and potentially this is the reason why everything else does not work as expected. And usually program detects drive type correctly. Any idea what might be special about your drives? Are there any non-standard drives used for example?

Can you please send me logs? I can check then how exactly program sees your drives, that might help.

Another thing that sounds completely odd from your post is this:

KLE74PP What puzzles me is this: I’ve spent several hours letting it scan Drive D again. It has already detected and imported over 11,000 images from that drive into the first folder,

This is also completely not the way it is supposed to work. When you SCAN drive, files do not move or get copied anywhere! They should remain where they are. Are you sure you are doing scanning, not using import funciton?

KLE74PP

Andrey

“However, for some reason program detects them as network drives. This is not at all how it supposed to be, and potentially this is the reason why everything else does not work as expected.”

Yes, exactly. They are all “USB” drives connected via USB 3. In Windows, they appear normally as “Local Disk.”

I don’t know why the program identifies them as “network” drives.

Note: I am using Google Translate for everything here, so some of the phrasing might be a bit confusing. I understand what you mean, though, and I appreciate you helping me look for solutions!

What is the best way for me to send you the “ini file” from drive D: as an example—without everyone else here being able to read it?

Andrey

KLE74PP I belive we will know more once you will send me logs as I asked above.

KLE74PP

Andrey
Which file exactly do you need?
The Config.json or the config.bck?
I can’t attach them here in the chat. How can I get them to you?

Andrey

KLE74PP I need logs. Here’s the instruction: https://community.tonfotos.com/d/26-making-debug-logs-in-tonfotos
Send it to support@tonfotos.com

KLE74PP

Andrey
Hello Andrey,
I have just drafted and sent the email, with the log file attached.
Thank you very much for your assistance!
Sunny regards

Andrey

KLE74PP Thank you, I will check it and get back to you.

Andrey

Andrey The fix is part of 1.16.4 now.