Lightroom Importer

[Grumpy Hec]

Hi

I'm starting a 30 day trial with a view of moving away from Lightroom for DAM work. I've indexed all my images, some 85k, and compacted the database. This took many hours as anticipated.  I'm now running the Lightroom importer to copy my LR Collections, must be at least 100 of them, and it appears to be running. However it has taken 6 hours so far and as it only shows a rotating emblem to show it is working I can not tell what the overall progress is and/or if it is in fact loading successfully. Whilst I anticipate  it could take some time, 6 hours plus does seem a bit excessive so I wonder does anybody have any typical timings for the Lightroom importer which may give a clue if all is well and I have to be patient or if there is a problem.

cheers

Hec

[Mario]

Hi,

this process is usually super fast (seconds!). It just converts your collections into IMatch categories.

Keep in mind that the converter application has been written using catalogs I have here in my lab, my own catalogs and catalogs sent in by users.
Adobe does not publish any information about how their catalog works and they have changed the catalog schema many times over the years. They don't want you to leave to easily ;-)

I had never a report about this kind of problem, so I have frankly no idea where to start analyzing this.
The Lr importer was a good idea some years ago, when many users switched from Lr. A marketing tool, so to speak.
It has been working well over the years (very few problem reports), but that does not mean that it works with every catalog, sorry.

I would say, cancel the process and then check in the Category View if and how many of your collections the importer has created.
Maybe running it a second time works better. No harm in that.

Also: IMatch produces a log file (see log file) which contains important info, e.g. how many categories it has created during that session.
Copy the log file before you restart IMatch and then ZIP and attach to your reply. Maybe this tells us more.


Tip: When IMatch is not running, make a backup copy of your database (in Windows Explorer, just copy the database file).
This way if things go real bad (unlikely) you can restore the backup and start over.

[Grumpy Hec]

Hi Mario

I have attached a before and after copy of the log file in case this helps.

However I suspect that it may not shed much light on the problem as all the categories have been created by the LR Importer. The problem seems to be that it cannot populate them. I have tried a small Collection/category and the result is the same as an attempt on all 322 categories.

I'll summarise the problem via bullet points in case this makes anything clearer.

> All 322 categories were successfully completed by the first run of the importer but could not be populated.
> I cancelled the run after 6 hours.
> After the first run I could not open LR as it reported an unknown error on the catalogue. I restored a backup and all is well with LR and has remained so after the several attempts of running the importer since.
> All the other database set up activities have worked well.
> I am on W10 20H2 and completely up to date
> Lightroom is completely up to date and the catalogue is  at version 2-2-V10. I could send that to you if it helped as the format did change on the last release which was in Oct/Nov if I remember correctly.

This is a bit of a stopper for me as I use collections ( now categories in IMatch) extensively and the thought of manually populating them is a daunting one. That my change to some extent as my minimal time spent looking at IMatch reveals a powerful @Keywords cat which, when combined with Events, may well replace 50% of my existing collections from Lightroom. Overall, if this current problem can be solved, I could well buy this software as it's pure DAM capability seems to far exceed LR even though I will have to adapt some of my workflow, particularly importing files for SD card, but that is no problem and is to be expected. As yet I haven't tried working with PS and Affinity Photo/publisher but I'm assuming that will work well.

Hope this all makes sense.

regards and thanks for responding so quickly

Hec

[Mario]

Nothing unusual in the log files. I would need the catalog here in my lab to analyze this and figure out what the problem is.
Fiddling with volatile and undocumented Lr catalogs is not something I really like to do, but the Lr Importer was a good marketing idea a couple of years ago.

The problem with Lr and the catalog was most likely that the catalog was still "open" in IMatch (somehow) and hence Lr could not open it. Or something.

You can send me the catalog to my support email address (or upload it to your cloud space and send me a link) support email address
I will not share it and delete it immediately after the diagnosis is finished. And when I find a solution I can send you an updated importer app.

You will find that Lr is severely lacking in the DAM part - something users figure out after having used a 'real' DAM like IMatch or one of the other popular DAM products.
It takes a while to learn about all the features IMatch offers, but your workflow should improve a lot and manual work should decrease as well.
For new users, I always recommend to keep the The 'Did You Know?'' App open, because it contains a ton of tips and tricks, for beginners and experienced users.
The Saving Time topic in the IMatch Help System contains pointers to helpful features and is well worth a look.

[Grumpy Hec]

Hi Mario

I'll get the cat to you. Hope it helps.

I did have another problem yesterday as did a quick trial with a brief edit in PS and then tried to manually version stack it. IMatch just hung and in the end I killed it as it did not appear to be doing anything. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong here which is of course always a possibility. I'll have another go at that but for now I'll concentrate on the category population problem.

regards

Hec

[Mario]

I work with Ps and IMatch every day. And I use manual version stacks frequently in some projects.
Stacking is instantaneous and I don't recall that a user has reported a hang in this feature.

1. Make sure your virus checker is not blocking IMatch and that it does not scan the database all the time. See IMPORTANT: Virus Checkers
This is often the cause for slow performance or strange behavior.

2. Switch IMatch to Debug logging via Help menu > Support
If this problem happens again, make a backup copy of the log file before restarting IMatch. You can also do that while IMatch is still running by copying the file in Windows Explorer.
ZIP and attach the log file. It will show us what IMatch was doing, and, most likely, which function failed on your system.

3. Note that Ps keeps files locked as long as they are open. Maybe this has some effect, although I've never had any issue with that and nothing similar was reported, ever.

[Grumpy Hec]

I have tried the version stacking again and this time it worked perfectly. No idea what happened the first time but that issue can be marked as resolved.

Regrading the LR Importer issue I have sent the cat file to you so help that provides the answers to this.

Hec

[Mario]

Regrading the LR Importer issue I have sent the cat file to you so help that provides the answers to this.
Hec

People send me files to check, bad metadata to analyze and other stuff all the time. There is always a backlog, sorry.