Asking too much of IMatch?

[snapzilla]

I have a folder tree that contains my library of photo ebooks, video courses and other photography related documents.  Filetypes include various video formats, various photo formats, pdfs, OpenOffice and MS-Office filetypes, text files and shortcut files, and others probably.

I'd like to use IMatch to help me find stuff by subject, by author etc.

When I ask IMatch to create a new database and drag the the top-level folder and select the include subfolders option I get a Win10 notification that IMatch has stopped working.

The adding metadata phase completes but the adding files phase stops after about 200 of 2400 files.

Am I asking too much of IMatch?

[Mario]

IMatch may not always responding to user interaction within 5 seconds when it is really busy. Windows then shows the dreaded "Not responding" message. I get that with Photoshop a lot myself 

If you report such an issue, please always include the ZIPped copy of the IMatch log file (see log file in the IMatch help for details).
The log file will show us if IMatch is running into any kinds of problems.

Processing video files is a super-demanding task. IMatch runs external programs to extract multiple thumbnails for each video (for the fly-over preview).

To produce thumbnails for OIffice documents, Microsoft relies on services provided by Windows - which sometime take a long time to respond.

PDF files are always a source for trouble. IMatch uses the Windows thumbnail generator routines to extract a preview. Windows relies on whatever thumbnail handler is installed for PDF. In many cases this is what Adobe installs when you install Acrobat Reader. And this Adobe thumbnail handler is known to have many problems. Crashing randomly. Excessive memory usage (I have a mall PDF created with Photoshop! which causes Acrobat to consume 3 GB of RAM before crashing).

All this may cause IMatch to stop responding when it hits one or more problem files.
The log file may tell us more. Usually the file names listed at the end of the log (before the hang/crash) tell us which files are causing problems.
Re-writing the files in the corresponding application or removing them from the folder usually solves the problem.

[snapzilla]

Thanks Mario.

By trial and error I narrowed the problem down to a folder of .dng files.  When I tried to open the folder in Explorer it also crashed.  I removed the offending folder and IMatch successfully created a new database of the remaining 2240 files.

[Mario]

When I tried to open the folder in Explorer it also crashed. 

This sounds like the 'DNG thumbnail handler' or the DNG WIC codec on your system is the problem.
Windows uses this to produce previews for DNG files. IMatch uses the DNG WIC codec to extract previews from DNG files.
Maybe updating the DNG codec solves the problem (unless you use the built-in DNG codec in Windows).

To test, you can select a DNG file in the IMatch File Window and then run Help > Support > WIC Diagnosis.
This tells you which WIC Codecs are installed and which one is responsible for DNG files.

[loweskid]

Have you used Adobe Bridge?  I had a similar problem a while back which was caused by an Adobe Bridge cache file (created by an earlier version of Bridge than I was currently using).  I searched for and deleted every file on my hard drive that had anything to do with Bridge and IMatch was fine after that.  I then let Bridge recreate the cache as needed.  No problems since.

[snapzilla]

Thanks Mario.

IMatch is a key component of my escape from Adobe.  It will be replacing Lightroom's Library Module.  My photo archive, which has a few .dng files -  was scanned by IMatch without issue.  The problem .dngs are part of my library of books and courses.  Once my photo workflow is 100% Adobe free I'll be removing Lightroom software and courses from my drives and deleting .dngs from my photo archive. 

[Mario]

As I explained above, use the WIC diagnosis in IMatch to determine which WIC codec for DNG is installed. If its the one from Adobe, it might be outdated and you should update it. There are many variants of DNG in use today and not all codecs handle all DNG variants equally well.