Making debug logs in Tonfotos

Andrey

Why we may ask you to send us debug logs?

It happens sometimes, that application works perfectly in our test lab, but fails on user computer. In order to fix the issue, we need to understand what causes this error, and ideally, learn how to reproduce it in our test environment. However, it might be quite hard to figure out based only on external symptoms. We might need more data. And debug logging is the way to get more data.

How can I can produce debug logs?

The procedure is following:

In the main menu of Tonfotos choose “Preferences”, open "Advanced’ tab and switch to “Enabled”. Press Done.
Now you need to reproduce the situation that leads to error.
After that, go to the “Preferences” and switch off the logs again. Otherwise it will contain too many data and will be too large.
Close Tonfotos.
Go to “Downloads” folder on your computer and locate “tonfotos.log”
(Optional) You may want to review this file to ensure it does not contain any sensitive data. This is just regular text file and can be opened by any text editor.
Send this file to andrey @ tonfotos.com with reference to relevant discussion on this forum.

Is it safe to share logs?

We do not need any sensitive information from you, and logs are designed to contain only what is helpful in debug process, nothing more. However, it may contain file names, labels, album names, directory paths, and other data like that, which you may consider as sensitive. In that case we encourage you to review and (if necessary) edit log files before sharing with us. However, please explicitly mark in the log those sections that you have edited, to make sure we are not mislead in our debugging process.

Andrey

Launching the Tonfotos application from the console

Unfortunately, sometimes you may encounter situations where, for some reason, you cannot launch the application interface to enable debug logging described above. However, in order to understand what is preventing the program from working normally, as an alternative, you can try running the application in console mode, because the program duplicates the output of many error messages to the console.

Running from the console on Window 10

You need to launch the console. To do this, enter the command in the search bar in the taskbar cmd and press Enter:

A console window will open where you can enter commands. First, let’s go to the folder where the Tonfotos application is installed with the command cd AppData\Local\tonfotos (to paste a line from the clipboard into the console window, you need to right-click)

Now you need to go down one more folder, but its name depends on the currently installed version, and has a name like app-1.4.2. To see what subfolders there are, enter the command dir /ad and see something like:

The automatic update system sometimes does not immediately delete folders from older versions, which is why there is more than one directory. We are interested in the current one - the latest one, in this case it is app-1.4.2 , so we enter the command cd app-1.4.2
Now we are in the application folder and can safely launch it with the command tonfotos.exe or tonfotos.exe --log. The application will launch and the various information it displays will appear on the screen. It was for the sake of this information that all this was started. If there are errors written there, then this can help to understand what exactly is wrong and why the program does not work as expected. It is necessary to take screenshots of this output and publish it in the appropriate discussion on the forum, or send it by email. Screenshots can be taken in different ways, for example by pressing “Win+Shift+S”. If you started with the key --log, then debugging logs will also begin to be written, which were discussed in the previous message above.

leonardoa

I guess you can also launch the app with the command: tonfotos.exe --log >report.txt
and you can then email the log file report.txt.