Confused about "Import new and updated files automatically"

[DavidOfMA]

On my machine, IMatch doesn't import new or updated files automatically, although that option is selected in Preferences. It just marks the folder as needing an update, even when I have IMatch open to the folder that I have externally added files to. I've waited as long as 20 minutes, doing nothing at all with IMatch, to make sure any background operations were completed, but it doesn't rescan those folders that have changed files.

Is there something else I need to do to get automatic folder scanning and file importing to happen?

Thanks,
David

[Mario]

This is an automatic process.
Check your settings under Edit > Preferences > Indexing.
Check the log file for warnings or error messages. It will tell which folders have been rescanned or why it failed etc.
IMatch does not automatically add sub-folders, if this is the problem.
Does a normal rescan work?
Is the folder maybe locked by another application (the log will tell).

[DavidOfMA]

Indexing is on, and the folders existed. I'll experiment and check warnings or errors in the log. There was no problem adding the files manually after they wouldn't add automatically.

[DavidOfMA]

Without doing anything new, IMatch on my machine is moving in the direction of automatically importing files. Behavior now is that IMatch appears to be ingesting files when I select the folder, so "on demand," but not before. I added some new files to two different folders in Explorer and then started IMatch. Nothing seemed to happen until I clicked on each of the folders, and then IMatch imported the added files. When I clicked one folder, it imported the new file and then eventually told me background processing was complete. Then I clicked the other folder, and it started importing the new files in that folder. Is this "on demand" processing by design? I did get one warning in the log that seemed to come when I clicked on the second folder. The log is attached, the error is: PTDataGrouper::Execute failed. Could not aquire a transaction.  'PTDataGrouper.cpp(879)'

Thanks,
David

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Mario]

This is not an error. It's just that IMatch is busy elsewhere and hence data-driven groups could currently not be updated. IMatch will automatically retry a few seconds later. IMatch does not rescan folders when you just started it, if this is what you expect. It will wait for a minute or so, then run over all folders in the database and compare the timestamps with the folders found on disk. If new or updated folders are found, they are added to a background processing queue and the folder gets the blue refresh icon. You can see this also in the Info & Activity panel. When the folder scan is completed and no other tasks have to be performed (e.g. category or collection updates), IMatch processes each folder in the background. If you click on it, is is just moved in front of the queue to give it more importance.

[DavidOfMA]

Thanks for this explanation. Now that IMatch runs fairly quickly because I disabled color management for thumbnails, I've been turning on most of the background processing options, and I had expected the folder scan to happen shortly after startup, as it used to (if I recall correctly) in IMatch 3.6. I've been working with it since, and it does indeed get to importing new or changed images after it has done other processing. So, all is well.

Thanks again,
David