Unreal image count

[Carlo Didier]

Just stumbled upon this bizarre count.
The DB has ~120 000 files, but after selecting the @All category, iMatch says that I have 1.6 million files and 27TB of data ... Completely illusional!

I can explain it if iMatch is counting everything it finds in every category, counting images multiple times if they are in multiple categories.

For me, this count isn't real, as I would prefer to know the number of distinct images, so that if I select for example a category "Nature|Forests" with subcategories "managed", "natural", "native", "coastal", ... some images may have more than one of those sub-categories assigned. The count might then give me for example 1000 when in reality there are only 500 distinct images, giving me the impression of having much more images in the category tree than there really are.

Maybe there could be a way to also display the number of effective (distinct) images?
I imaginge that this could cause much more processing, but if it was made "on demand", it would only be computed when asked.

[Mario]

Each category counts the images assigned to it directly, and the sum of the counts of all it's child categories.
It does deliberately not display unique files, this would be wrong.
@All is not different.

To see the total number of unique files in your database, use the corresponding counts in the Media & Folders View (Properties panel of the Database Node) or the corresponding stats in the Info & Activity panel.

[Carlo Didier]

It does deliberately not display unique files, this would be wrong.

In my view, that would be the correct count. The count it displays does not correspond with anything real or useful. And 26 virtual TB instead of 2 real TB? Totally useless. Better display nothing then.

To see the total number of unique files in your database, use the corresponding counts in the Media & Folders View (Properties panel of the Database Node) or the corresponding stats in the Info & Activity panel.

That's not what I want. I want the real number of images in any category tree that I choose to select.
It would be a bad surprise to see an imaginary count of 500 images to choose from in a category, but to realize later that there are actually only 100 or less!

[Mario]

Maybe I did explain it wrong.
When I check the count of @All, I see the total number of files in my database. For example, my current database has 73.029 files.

This is also the count shown for @All and the same info is in the Info & Activity Panel.
And the same number of files is also shown in the File Window.
Unless you enable the hierarchical display mode and show the hierarchy of course. And how many levels you show.
Then each category is loaded separately into the File Window and any file can appear more than once. And this the total number of files shown and calculated in the File Window caption.

For my test database (73.029 files), I can force the File Window to list more than 1 million (!) files when I use the hierarchical mode.
The total file size count follows this logic, there is no special logic to count it based on unique files. Hierarchical display mode for categories make not that much sense, after all.