Undo 'stop indexing' and autorotation

greyilocks · 2025-01-17T13:22:02+00:00

I have a load of CR3 portrait images that were rotated horizontally. Different viewers display these images different ways, which is a nightmare. Exiftool s...

Undo 'stop indexing' and autorotation

greyilocks

After sending. that, I found another blog that explained this.

Go to ‘tonfotos’, ‘library locations’, and clear the ‘ignored locations’ entry.

I’m hoping the re-indexing that’s being carried out will sort the ‘corrupted’ cached image issue out, though should this have been taken care of by the ‘stop indexing’ action? Or would this have lost face info? I don’t know.

greyilocks

Okay, the re-indexing has added a second copy of the link to the same photo under the appropriate person. The first one gives the ‘corrupted image’ message (with ‘Additional metadata is not available since the location is disconnected’ in the metadata box), and the second goes to the newly-indexed photo.

So the question is, how do I get rid of the ones that give the ‘corrupted image’ message? Unfortunately, there are a lot of pictures in that folder, and a few people are referenced there. I’d like to avoid doing this by hand, but even then, what would be the best way of doing it?

Andrey

You are right, Library locations is the way to get folders back.

greyilocks What’s worse, the images are still there in the people views, but clicking on the cached images says ‘image is corrupted … undefined’.

That sounds like a bug. After ignoring folder those files should just be deleted from Tonfotos database, but they were not for some reason. Did you close the application immediately after ignoring? This is not typical situation, I would like to know how to reproduce this issue to fix it.

As to “what to do” it is hard to say without knowing details. Can you please post a screenshot of the file information panel that shows both files as duplicaties? (one real file and one ghost)

greyilocks

I’d rather not post screenshots, as there’s a load of metadata there.

I wonder whether I’d queued a re-index of the folder, didn’t realise it hadn’t finished, but then selected ‘stop indexing’, then rescanned the parent folder?

To be honest, the English there is a little confusing. ‘Stop indexing’ sounds like you want to stop the re-index that you’ve asked for and is currently being carried out, and it should perhaps have been ‘Do not index’, ‘Not to be indexed’, ‘Remove from indexing’, or something similar. If you want any help with English here, give me a shout.

I guess I’m stuck now, and won’t be able to clear down the bad entries easily?

Here’s what the erroneous photo has for metadata:

Andrey

greyilocks I wonder whether I’d queued a re-index of the folder, didn’t realise it hadn’t finished, but then selected ‘stop indexing’, then rescanned the parent folder?

Hm, you started several tasks with the same files in parallel, I guess something went wrong there and ended up that deletion was not the last operation that was reflected in the DB. Thank you, that gives some food for thought. Probably we need to add some additional checks in the code to avoid situations like that in the future. I have added tasks to our backlog.

Regarding “ghost” files, I’m afraid I don’t have ready simple solutions for you. I can think of something, but I need more information to undestand situation better. With the one you provided screenshot for, how exactly you are able to view this file? Since it has "undefined’ in the location, I doubt you can access it thru the Folder view, since it is not bound to any folder right now. I also do not see any face associated. How do you access this file?

greyilocks

I’m seeing two entries under, say, Steve in the Person tab. I can see the same face shot there twice, but only one has the correct metadata and lets me click on on it to get the original photo. The other just gives an error message. But both tiles are identical.

Andrey

greyilocks Yep, that what I would expect to hear, and my response would be “just use Ignore face suggestion at faces from ghost files to get rid of them”. However, on the screenshot you provided, there is no face at all. So it left me wondering that even if this file is a ghost, there should be no way it would appear in the interface as it lost links to everything. Hence my question.

greyilocks

I can get rid of the duplicate entries with ‘ignore face suggestion’. I guess I’ll have to go through these by hand and do it a few hundred times … but if there’s a faster way then please let me know.

I think the issue for me was that the faces were sideways, and when I hit ‘re-index’ on the photo in the ‘Person’ tab, the photo disappeared, and was presumably redrawn at some random position in the list, but there were so many photos that I couldn’t see the updated version, and updating the whole folder was taking ages … hence the attempt at speeding things up with ‘stop indexing this folder’.

If the updated photo had been displayed at the bottom or top of the section, or in exactly the same position, I could have quickly seen whether the re-index had worked. But I couldn’t see whether it had worked, and got impatient. It will be a whole lot worse now that I have to go through them all by hand … ! 🙁

Andrey

greyilocks Sorry that this is causing issues. There is definintely some hidden bug that lead to this situation, and your description helps a lot to narrow down the search.

greyilocks

Yes, race conditions/sequencing can cause a lot of headaches. This just needs some kind of state handling correcting.

In the end, it wasn’t too bad. In case it helps anyone, here’s what I did …

Tonfotos is pretty quick, so I moved through my photos using the right cursor key, watching the metadata panel. If there was metadata, it would go off to get the data from the picture, and would thus take a little time. But if there wasn’t any then it would instantly come up with ‘no metadata’, in which case I could use the keyboard shortcut ‘shift-backspace’ to remove the entry, then use the right cursor key to move to the next entry. Sounds tricky, but you soon get the hang of it. Thankfully, I hadn’t indexed my full collection of photos yet … 😉

Thanks for your help with this, Andrey.

greyilocks

I’ve just found a couple that I’d missed. I wonder whether you could have an option to show which photos don’t have metadata, e.g. an overlay on any photo that doesn’t have data, that could be turned on/off? Or (optionally) display photos without metadata at the start/end of the Person section.

I appreciate that this looks like an edge case, but:

if a similar issue occurs and someone had thousands of photos indexed, it would help to correct the problem.
I wonder whether this facility would be useful anywhere else? I guess it could show you which photos were scanned versus taken with a digital camera? Or were on an unplugged external drive. This would be certainly be useful for indicating that the actual picture of that person was on the external drive - I’ve just discovered that you only find that out when you double-click on the photo, and then you have to double-click to go back (in this case, I wanted a quick look at the full resolution picture, which was external, and the cache had presumably been flushed (some were still visible)).

I’ll create a suggestion for this.

Anyway, I have to say the tonfotos UI really is lovely. Great work!

Andrey

greyilocks Thank you for kind words.

There is good progress in fixing the core issue thanks to you, since we have way to reproduce it, it was much easier.

As to dealing with consequences - I do not think there should be any UI for that. This should not happen in the first place. We will think about ways how to deal with those ghosts, please stay tuned.

Andrey

greyilocks Regarding files that already bacame ghost. Checking the code I found out that those will actually be automatically deleted later. There is garbage collection mechanism that takes case of those after two weeks delay. Faces will be cleared too. So it looks like no additional changes needed, all we need to do is to wait.

Andrey

Andrey Bugfix release 1.11.2 is out already.