"Updating" takes forever

[rienvanham]

Hi Mario,

I've got a small issue and don't know how to solve it. After adding some folders with photo's Imatch states "updating" and this takes allready days. The photo's in the folders stay dark.

Any idea to get out of this?

Thanks in advance,

Rien.

[Mario]

Closed and restarted IMatch?
Always include the ZIPped log file with such reports. This will tell us what IMatch is doing, if it runs into any kind of problem etc.

[rienvanham]

Sorry! Hereby the logfile. Just stared iMatch (again) and is waiting forever.

[Mario]

I see many critical warning messages from ExifTool:

ETWARN:Warning: Error rebuilding maker notes (may be corrupt) - E:\Bestanden\Originele Foto's\2006\20060709\20060709_163654_Kermis.jpg
Warning: Error rebuilding maker notes (may be corrupt) - E:\Bestanden\Originele Foto's\2006\20060709\20060709_164119_Kermis.jpg
...

These errors seem to severe that IMatch has to handle internal errors while processing the files or ExifTool may even crash while processing these files. This takes a long time, which indicates that the corrupted data in these files is giving ExifTool a really hard time.

Corrupted maker notes like this are produced when an application which is not aware of maker notes tries to modify EXIF metadata or other data, and messes up the maker notes in the process.
Did you modify these files with other software?

[rienvanham]

Hi Mario,

Yes, besides iMatch I'm using Capture One Pro (which doesn't store any information in the original file) and Photo Mechanic Pro (which stores information in the original file). Could that be the course? Strange, I've processed all my files with PMP.

Any idea how to solve the marker notes?

I think I found the reason (perhaps a glitch in iMatch). I'm using structured keywords in my files and (I think) I made a mistake in search and replace. So, these are now the keywords (example):

2007
Nederland | Noord-Brabant | Boxtel
Vervoer | Spoor | Station
Vervoer | Spoor | NS
|

The last line ("|") causes the problem. If I remove this line then iMatch does the job!

Thanks,

Rien.

[rienvanham]

I removed all "invalid" entries from the photo's (they all are about "Kermis" (Kirmes / Fair)) and now iMatch returned to "normal"!

Thanks for your help.

[Mario]

Send me an image file which produces this problem.
IMatch does not allow to enter or store "empty" keywords (like the last row in your example), so this must have been added by another software.
But this should not cause problems for ExifTool or IMatch. I need an example image to analyze this further.

[rienvanham]

Hi Mario,

No, it is not caused by iMatch. It is caused by Photo Mechanic Plus. This software allows you to add structured keywords and then do a search and replace which can end in an empty structure.

Hereby a photo with such a tag.

Thanks!

Regards,
Rien.

[Mario]

The attached image contains no metadata at all.
Please ZIP before to prevent the community from re-encoding and stripping metadata.

[rienvanham]

Hereby the zipped file.

[Mario]

Better. This file contains keywords and metadata.
And indeed, one of the keywords added by PM consists of a single | - which makes not much sense.
IMatch ignores empty keywords, but the routine which flattens keywords via thesaurus lookups did not handle the case that splitting a keyword using | does not return anything.

I have that fixed for the next release, thanks.

[rienvanham]

Great Mario!

Thank you very much. I don't think I'll ever run in this again but you never know!

Cheers from the Netherlands.

[Mario]

It was a bug. We now have prevented that other users experience the same problem. Very good!