IMatch fights with Hugin panorama maker

[stonecherub]

Hugin is a useful FREE program that stitches images together to make panoramas. In the process, it creates tiff files. IM set to scan folders for changes will detect these temporary files and import them and, sometimes, the two programs will conflict. I have made several panoramas with both open in the past two days and this morning, they fought.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to shut IM down if a folder receives temporary image files during a process. 

[Mario]

It's not clear from your report what you mean with "fight".
What happens? Do the apps crash? Error messages? Sparks flying? What exactly happens.

Applications creating temporary files is pretty common. All Adobe products and most RAW processors create temporary files all the time, even in the same folder as the images, or in sub-folders containing settings or whatnot.

If you configure IMatch to automatically pick up changes in the file system, IMatch will rescan folders as soon as Windows notifies it of changes made to these folders. IMatch already waits for a short while after receiving these messages in order to work better with these applications, e.g. Photoshop or LR.

My guess is that your other application deletes huge temporary TIFF files in the same folder you manage in IMatch. IMatch picks up these files and brings them into the database. Just to find out later that your other application has removed these files again. Is this what you mean with "fight". Or does IMatch reading the TIFF file cause the other application to fail? What exactly happens?

Usually when software creates temporary files it does so using special file extensions like ".tmp" or something. IMatch ignores files with file extensions not supported so this is no problem. If your other software creates temporary files with the .tif extension, you will get the behavior I describe above. In this case, either close IMatch, disable the automatic folder scan or configure your other application to create temporary files in a folder not managed by IMatch - for example in the TEMP folder dedicated to this kind of data.

[stonecherub]

The tiffs are gone but the fight goes on.

Originally, Hugin stopped working when the tiff holding places appeared among the jpg files shown in IMatch. It eventually displayed a "Fail" message box. I shut IMatch down and rebuilt the panorama that I viewed using FPV out of file manager which found no tiff files.

Higin did, indeed, remove the tiff files after the panorama had been stitched BUT IMatch displayed holding places for the tiffs among the other files (no image thumbnail) and I can't get rid of them. I ran ALL of the database tools; diagnostics, compact, clear processing Queues, rebuild search and visual. Each one shows the unwritten metadata pencil  (no metadata shown in panel) but these files don't exist so I can't clear that flag.

There seems to be no other problem, just 10 empty but permanent gray boxes among my thumbs.

[Mario]

Are these files marked as off-line (yellow icon)?
When you rescan the folder, IMatch will remove all files not longer available in the file system.

[stonecherub]

Duuuhhh, Oh! Learned something new that I should have known, sorry for wasting your time.

[Mario]

IMatch does not remove files automatically from the database.
This is to prevent accidental data loss when you move/rename a file outside of IMatch. If this happens, you can use the Relocate feature in IMatch to tell it where the files have been moved or show IMatch the new name of the file.

A rescan however will synchronize the database with the current folder contents, adding/updating/removing files as required.