Possible to prevent IMatch from searching for metadata from file?

[photomy]

I have movie .iso image files that IMatch is trying to find metadata within when brought into database and the process goes on forever.  Is it possible to prevent this and have IMatch only read/write from external xmp buddy files?

[Mario]

.ISO files are not normally indexed by IMatch. It is not one of the standard formats.
Did you perhaps added .ISO as a user-defined format?

[photomy]

Yes.  I did add it because I wanted to try to use IMatch as a catalog engine for movies as well - separate database, however. So far working okay, except for the excessive scanning when the movie image files are brought in to the database.

[Mario]

When you explicitly added .ISO (which are usually disk images and thus gigabytes in size) , and ExifTool reports that it can read metadata from the format, IMatch will let ExifTool run on the file.
IMatch will also generate a checksum of the file, try to extract a visual representation of the file and a thumbnail, visual query data etc. All this takes time for files with gigabytes in size.

You did not include a log file so I don't know what takes how long - but ISO disk images are not something you usually manage in a digital asset management system. ISO images are just large binary blobs.

You may save some time by configuring the maximum size for the cache under Edit > Preferences > Cache perhaps. IMatch then skips some steps for files exceeding the maximum size configured there.