Synchronization after renaming a person. How does it work?

renedo

I don’t undersand how tonfotos propagate the information to people’s faces and manage the synchronisation between 2 PCs when I rename a person. I changed the name a person, let’s say “Mary”, to “Mary Corbett” on PC A. It seems that the change is not immédiately propagated to tonfotos.ini files in the subfolders, but only when I change something in the files of the subfolder. Am I correct?
I am Ok with that, but what happens on PC B sharing the same fotos directories? I do not see any change a PC B, “Mary” is still named “Mary”. Will it synchronize later? And what happens if tonfotos on PC B modifes a picture file with Mary’s or "Mary Corbett’s face, will the tonfotos.ini file be updated to the previous name “Mary”? Do I have manually to apply the same rename to PC A and PC B at the same time to avoid conflict on names? Is the people.tnfp file the common name reference and PC B will finally synchronize itself after some time (I have a huge database of more than 100 000 files)?
I did find any any explanation in the documentation or in the blog. It would be nice to have an tutorial on how it works and to know who owns the name reference.
I will appreciate any help from the community.

Andrey

renedo There are two independent information channels:

ini files. They are located next to the images and contain information about association of faces with people. Since there are many of them, they are not updated immediatelty after you make a change, but will be updated eventually.
dossier file. There is only one file stored in the root of your archive. It contains all the details about people, but it does not know anything about files and faces.

So if you just rename a person, do not change association with faces and you did not turn on storing dossier file in settings, then most likely this information will not be synched at all. Technically, two copies can have same person named differently, and faces associations will still be synced fine. But that will change once you enable dossier file on both copies. Then this change will be synced almost immediately (assuming this is Windows, on other OS it might take longer due to differences in file system watch function implementation)

renedo

Thank you very much for your quick answer, I appreciate the service, it’s really great.
I understand the sync should be done through the dossier file, assuming we enable the dossier file on both copies. This is what I have done, but it does not sync smoothly.
I have checked. On PC A (named DOUCET-PC2), the library is images, with dossier file enabled. . On PC B, the library is \DOUCET-PC2\images, with dossier file enabled. I can access the same people.tnfp file from the 2 PCs. I have made some modifications (names and relations) this morning at 11 am, I can see them in the file. But today at 6pm, they are not synced on PC B. Does it take that long?

Andrey

renedo No it does not. As I said, dossier sync is almost immediate. Please check if second app actually has access to the files (can open photos full screen, can view metadata in file info panel). Most likely there is connection issue or something of that nature.

renedo

I have added a small library with 3 files and dossier file enabled. I read in an old message on the blog that it is a way to speed up the sync and it worked perfectly. The people name and relations are now synced between 2 PCS, and even a third one, and it is really fast. I work now with the reference library (300 Go+ and 130 k files) + the small speed up library, and 2 (identical, I presume) people.tnfp files, and it works fine.
I have’nt changed anything in the access rights and network parameters ( The Library on PC A is declared with RW access for 2 users on the local network). So I guess the delay issue is related to the size of the library.

Andrey

renedo I am glad you found a solution.

On Windows there is mechanism for file changes notifications that starts immediately your library is scanned after program starts. When it is on, if file dossier gets changed, Tonfotos will be notified immediately. This is why sync is almost immediate. On Windows (unlike macOS) this works on shared network drives too and it should not depend on how many files there are on shared folder. But this all is outside of Tonfotos, this is all done by your OS. So if something does not work as expected there, this is also something we have no control over. Probably someone with deep understanding of Windows networking would be able to debug it on your PC, but this is not something I can help you with remotely, unfortunately. Anyway, good that workarround works.