I unknowingly put iMatch into a potentially week+ long processing marathon, by telling it to apply all 300k+ pending metadata changes to our files.
(At the start I was quite pleased: the time estimate began with 4 hours, then a few minutes...but soon grow to over 250 hours!)
The problem became more visible upon clicking "cancel"...
- It took a LONG time before the dialog box disappeared
- After that, the UI was still completely unresponsive. Just a spinning wait icon. :(
- YET, examining the log file showed it was actively still applying metadata changes without pause
FWIW, I believe I found a temporary workaround to gently shut down iMatch:
- Right click on the system tray icon
- Choose "close window"
- Looking at the log file, I could tell iMatch was shutting down Exiftool instances, and within a minute or two, it closed.
However, in general it is scary to feel an app is completely out of my control. I'm hopeful there are existing methods to work around the above.
1) Is there a way to tell iMatch to NOT use as many Exiftools as there are cores? I see something similar for face recognition, but not for the general case. And would that do any good anyway?
2) Is it intentional that clicking "cancel" on write-metadata doesn't actually stop the process? I would hope "cancel" actually brings that process to an end, so that at some future time one could again request writing out more or all pending metadata writes...
Process Control (Advanced Setting) (https://www.photools.com/help/imatch/rmh_config_appsettings.htm?dl=hid-15)
THANKS. Found it soon after writing that....