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Topics - David Dyer-Bennet

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Lightroom is now also a factor; can't really use Thumbs Plus with Lightroom since the Lightroom changes to metadata prefer going to XMP files, and must go there for some file formats.  Yeah, one could just ignore Thumbs Plus and use Lightroom as the main index also, but I don't want to do that, it's not nearly as good as TP -- except for this minor issue that TP won't find the metadata in more and more of my photos.  Making TP more and more nearly useless....

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ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database conversion
« on: 2016-10-16 20:50:06 »
I've got an existing Thumbs.tpdb8 file of 1.762 GB (limit is 2GB, right?); so I'm not out of space yet but I'm getting worried.  

I believe I have quite a few keywords in the db that aren't embedded in the original files -- I think that's what I ended up with when keywording RAW formats that TP doesn't know how to modify for example.  So I can't just trash my database, create a new one, and let it do a massive reindex.  There might I suppose also be other data not embedded in the files, I can't prove otherwise.

Is there any other way to convert to SQlite?

Alternatively, is there a way to check whether in fact the database reflects only file data?  Or is there a way to extract from the database a list of keywords at least that *aren't* also embedded in the files?  

As a desperation move I suppose I could export a complete set of keyword / image file pairs, rebuild the database, and then add back all those pairs (which would be a waste of time for the ones already found in the image files, but would fill in the missing ones. I suspect it would take a while, too.  Also not completely sure how I could export such a list, I don't have Access.

Any other ideas?  Is there  a free DB tool, or a Perl or Python library, or something, that will read the .tpdb8 file format (I think that's a version of Access, but whatever it really is)?

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I seem to remember this being inconsistently troublesome forever.  Maybe it's me.

Anyway, right now, NEFs shot vertically (with my Nikon D700) are oriented wrong when thumbnails are made of them in TP 9 SP2 B3 (build 3943).  

I have the Digicam Raw plug-in options set to NOT rotate based on EXIF (bottom checkbox in the General tab), and TP 9 Preferences / Metadata / Rotate based on XMP/EXIF orientation is checked.  This seems to be the recommended settings from the release notes.

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General Discussion / Running python itself
« on: 2014-11-01 17:14:48 »
Thumbs Plus seems to contain a full Python installation, with extra TP goodness packaged in;  on my Windows 7 system I have C:\Program Files (x86)\ThumbsPlus9\Python, and in that file python.exe and pythonw.exe and the LICENSE.txt, NEWS.txt, and README.txt files that I believe a normal Python install has.  Plus the subdirectories with various things in them.

But, when I run (locally, or via PATH) python.exe from there, I get "The program can't start because python27.dll is missing from your computer."  And, looking through those directories, there is in fact no python27.dll. (What I tried precisely is, from  a Windows command window, "python.exe --version".  It clearly found python.exe, but couldn't go much beyond that.)  

I do see C:\Program Files (x86)\ThumbsPlus9\Python\libs\python27.lib and also libpython27.a, which suggests that maybe the Python in Thumbs Plus is statically linked rather than built as a DLL, which seems weird off the top of my head but I've never done a Python embedding so I don't know what the issues are.  So, in that case, the appearance of having a Python distribution present isn't real, maybe?  (And those exe files that look so tempting but can't work under that theory shouldn't be there, then; save space in the installer and on my system, avoid a source of confusion, etc.)

I can of course install another Python installation and do my initial testing on that (I was hoping to use the TP one to avoid having possibly different versions for when I ran something within TP and when I ran standalone).  And soon I'll probably (I hope) be tied into TP internals and thus unable to run my scripts anywhere else.  This may not make much difference.

But at the moment it looks weird, like an anomaly, and I hate leaving anomalies I don't understand behind me as I dive into things; too often they prove I really don't understand them by biting me in the ass later.  

I don't imagine anybody but some of the actual developers can actually *answer* this, and it's probably not important to that many people anyway.  But just in case, and to document what I'm doing, I'm posting it.

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General Discussion / Running a python script
« on: 2014-10-31 17:23:42 »
Does anybody have the faintest idea how to run a Python script?  I've found the directory the ones supplied with TP are in, which gives me some hints about what libraries to access to do various things, but I don't have the faintest idea how to invoke a Python script from within Thumbs Plus.  

This seems like the most basic thing to document -- with this, we can get started experimenting, but without this, we're groping completely in the dark to do anything at all.

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General Discussion / What puts which metadata where?
« on: 2014-08-11 22:30:18 »
A big problem with recent versions of Thumbs Plus has been that the metadata handling is completely changed, and not well explained.  I've been trying to come to terms with some of it, and my latest abomination is this:

If I use the File / Edit Metadata dialog to append keywords to a jpg image, they're stored just in the Thumbs Plus database, not in the .jpg file.  However, if I use the same File / Edit Metadata dialog and tell it to append to the Supplemental Categories field, *that* goes into the jpg file (as tested by using Irfan View to examine what's in the file after making the change).  

It's this kind of thing that drives users bonkers.  I've seen a really large number of comments, even whole threads, here where people are confused and unhappy with this new metadata handling mechanism.  I agree, the old one worked a LOT better; this new scheme doesn't actually work at all -- there's no way I can find to put keywords into a file with Thumbs Plus any more.

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Ideally, Activestate perl, opening a Thumbs Plus Access database using DBI and the ODBC drivers.  I find myself descending into a mad-house of architecture errors (32-bit vs. 64-bit), missing drivers, etc.  (I'm looking to take a bigger hammer to my keyword problems, using perl externally since there's no documentation on how to use the internal Python scripting.)

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ThumbsPlus v7-v9 Questions / TP9 breaking my keywords
« on: 2014-08-10 20:46:19 »
I'm slow this year, I guess. I've finally realized one of the things that's causing my ongoing keyword rot.

When I first started applying keywords to my photos, I labeled people in the "best practices" way you identify people in one field -- using "last, first".  This worked fine.

At some point, Thumbs Plus started getting confused about those existing keywords in image files when I re-scanned them, and treated them as two separate keywords.  I don't know when this changed, and nothing warned me at the time.  

Any ideas on how I can possibly recover from this disaster?

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ThumbsPlus v7-v9 Questions / Keyword handling
« on: 2014-08-10 19:28:18 »
I've got 172k thumbnails in my database, and a bit short of 100k keyword references so far.  Many of them are of some historical interest for people in the science fiction community. I delve into the old portions of the archive, as well as the new ones, fairly frequently.

For various reasons, like TP not being able to write to certain file formats, and some others, quite a few of the keyword references aren't written into the IPTC fields in the files.  Sometimes this is for file formats that TP can *now* write into, but couldn't back when I applied the keywords.  Sometimes, I believe, it's because some ways of applying keywords over the years (including today) just update the database, they don't write into the file, even for file formats TP can write into.

(Side note: I really wish it were a lot harder to create that situation accidentally!)

Now, I need to avoid having vital data that exists *only* in the TP database.  In addition to my basic paranoia, and my fear of "lock-in", there's an important reason: when I process an image and save a jpeg for the web, for example, I want the jpeg to include the keywords assigned to the image!  *ALL* of them, the ones in the database as well as the ones in the image file.  Now, there's no way for an external program to know what's in the TP database; to achieve this, I think I have to make sure that the image files contain the keywords (as IPTC keywords).

(By the way, this business of not being able to write into certain file formats -- it is of course unavoidable sometimes for a while, when new file formats are released, and for some file formats it may in practice be permanent.  There is of course a well-known, essentially standard, technique for working around this, widely understood by all serious photo software: side-car XMP files.  TP needs to be able to handle sidecar XMP files!)

So, there are three things for moving keywords around that I need:

1)  Make sure all keywords in database are in image file (or sidecar).  This would look up the keywords in the database, and then check each one in the image file, and if it's not there add it.  

2)  Make sure all keywords in image file are in database.  This exists now, it's done when you make a new thumbnail.

3) Do both -- assemble all keywords from both sources, and then make sure they're recorded in both places.

(An automated process to keep them in sync would be desirable perhaps -- except deciding when to allow TP to write into image files is something the user needs control of, so the manual process is necessary anyway.  People change policies, etc.)

As it is, I'm feeling trapped, and I hate that.  I have lots of valuable keyword information that only exists in the TP database, and I have no other way to access it.

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When I first made the choice, long ago, I stuck with Access.  That's now wrong for me, and I'm in danger of bumping up against the file size limit too.  I used to have a working Access 97, but that's not much use with Access 200 files, and there's now more available for SQLite anyway.  

But there doesn't seem to be any way to convert my existing database to a different format.  Since much of the keywording exists only in the database (because Thumbs Plus doesn't know how to write some of my file formats), just trashing it and starting over is out of the question.

Ideally I might want to change to storing the thumbnails in files, too; not sure if that's a win for SQLite or not.  

How come this is so hard? I see lots of discussions of various conversion issues, and no good answers for this one.  Exporting and importing fails mysteriously with an error saying the file format is wrong.

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ThumbsPlus Suggestions / Sidecar XMP files
« on: 2012-04-29 14:47:52 »
I really need to get data from sidecar XMP files into Thumbs Plus.  

Using Photo Mechanic, for some file formats, rating and IPTC info can go into the image file itself (JPEGs always, some RAW formats; though there are people who on principle don't want those files modified AT ALL); but for some formats (such as my Olympus EPL-2 RAW files), Photo Mechanic creates a sidecar file.

Then the rating information and the IPTC info doesn't get imported into Thumbs Plus.  And the keywords don't either.  

I really need an option for Thumbs Plus to be able to read data from sidecar XMP files.

(The other program I use with sidecar files is Bibble Pro.)

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