NEW USER ...

[MGBJAY]

... As a new user, I have had a number of issues which I have communicated to the Developer, who has at last directed me to this place. Thank You.

So, as of today, and due to one of the issues that has been such a bother - which goes like this - AFFINITY PHOTO files have a tendency to not appear as anything other than the AFFINITY logo.

So I did what was described to fix that, i.e., SHIFT-CONTROL-F5. Did that for a number of folders and nothing changed. Still the AF logo.

Then I thought today after spending hours reading FORUM suggestions - to try and re-scan the entire database ... a genuinely tedious and never-ending process taking 2.25 hours by the time it had all completed.

After that time-consuming process ended, I then shut down the computer and started it up all over again. Once up, I invoked the IMATCH software all by itself with nothing else running. Now mind you I have a fairly well equipped machine ... AMD CORE 6 - 32 GB ram - NVIDIA GTX 600 Ti - Multiple SSD's and my designated "image drive" ... an INTEL 1TB NVM Express.

All together, a reasonably fast machine, capable of pretty much anything I have thrown at it ... so far.

One of the issues that I am now facing, after all this is this:

I have a folder selected in the LEFT panel ... in the RIGHT panel are a number of images ... I select ONE image (perfectly clear and crisp) and then move my cursor to the QUICK VIEW button at the extreme right side of the panel and the selected image opens - however, that image, which I thought "should" be a spittin' image of the file selected, is in fact a very blurry version of the selected image in the left panel. And for the life of me, I cannot figure why the selected image is perfectly clear and crisp and the Quick View version is blurry.

It remains blurry as well when I "right click" and select "Open With Viewer".

What in the heck am I doing wrong? It oughtn't be this difficult, ought it?

Another issue is that while displaying the DRIVES that are depicted as being in the "database" panel in the upper left panel under Media & Folders ... the drives that contain my images ONLY show their driver letters, but NOT the drive names. Why do the names not appear as they should? What I am expecting is this D:\ PHOTO STORAGE - E:\ IMAGE INTAKE - I:\ AFFINITY ...

... what I get is this D:\ - E:\ - I:\

So for now, these are a few of the issues that I am trying to resolve in IMATCH, and would appreciate helpful feedback.

I will try to attach images to help illustrate what I am seeing.

Thank You.

[Mario]

Hi, welcome to the community.

1.  If the Viewer or Quick View panel show a blurry image they have been forced to fall back to use a 160 pixel thumbnail because the file format you were trying to view was not supported.

The default for IMatch is to fill the Quick View Panel (or Viewer) by enlarging smaller images.
Left-click into the Window and press Alt+Z to disable this. Or right click and disable the "Enlarge smaller images". Then you see the images in their real size, which is probably something like 120 or 160 pixel.

IMatch supports over 100 file formats, plus about 300 RAW format variants using the installed WIC codecs and LibRaw.

As I wrote in our email exchange, Serif (Affinity) does deliberately not publish their file format specification. The files produced by Affinity Designer and Photo are proprietary and undocumneted. I guess this is in preparation of the long-anticipated Affinity DAM. If they make it impossible for other DAM software to support their files, they will get more customers. Or maybe they have other reasons, I don't know. Ask them if you need more info.

Affinity software usually installs a shell thumbnail handler which enables Windows to extract a thumbnail from Photo and Designer files. IMatch uses this automatically.
This allows IMatch to at least produce thumbnails for Designer and Photo files. I use both applications on Windows 10 and I have no problems with IMatch displaying only the icon. Maybe your files are special in some way? Do you use the latest versions of the Affinity products? I've just rescanned by sample Designer and Photo files and all, except one, produce a result. For the one which fails, Windows returns an "unsupported format". Which probably means that the Affinity thumbnail handler failed to process the file. This is pretty much a black box.

For all Affinity installations I have seen so far (including my own) this component installed by Affinity produces thumbnails with a maximum size of 512 pixels. This is all you get.

Since Affinity provides no higher resolution, does not document their file formats, does not even provide a WIC codec, you make yourself entirely dependent on their proprietary file format and software. Nothing I can do about this.

2.  The Media & Folder View shows the drive letters (or media names for removable media or UNC share names for network rssources) because it represents the physical view of your system. There was never a need to display the drive label assigned when formatting a drive.  The C: drive is the C: drive. Why would you also see the drive name? I guess that most users never change the label and it is hence something that Windows comes up with at time of installation. For example, my C: driver has been labeled BOOT when installing Windows. I really don't care.

As I wrote in the email, the drive label, size, remaining capacity is displayed in the properties panel below the tree. (You may need to open it).



If you feel that displaying the drive name in addition to the drive letter would be helpful for yourself and other users, feel free to add a feature request in the feature request board:

https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?board=12.0

This allows user users to see your request and to comment on it. If several users would like to have this, I can add an option to display the drive label in addition to the letter.

3.  If you report issues related to performance, please include a ZIPped version of the IMatch log file from the IMatch session where you experienced the issue.
This allows us to see what IMatch was doing, how much time IMatch was spending in features etc.

See log file for information about the IMatch log file, where to find it, how to use it.

[Mario]

Forget the feature request. I've added support for displaying drive labels as an option for the next release.
Its on by default (I see no harm in that) so you need to do nothing once the next release is out.

[MGBJAY]

Mario;

I'm impressed with the response time to my query.

Thank You for the update. And thank you for adding the drive name addition. I find it useful due to the fact that I have a number of SSD's in my system, and being able to distinguish them by name is consistent with the native set-up in my system. While it may not have come up earlier, I'd bet I'll not be the only one grateful for making that change available.

MGBJAY

[Mees Dekker]

I quite agree

[afengler]

+1