Messages

16

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / TD4 Squeezer Tool

« on: 2017-04-21 13:50:30 »

I found that the information in the Thumbnail filed in the database in fact is a standard JPEG information, i.e. the same bytes as would be in a *.jpg file. This even seems to be an official database standard, as the softwre development environment I use, does have a "control" that simply can be assigned the database (BLOB) field name and then it will automatically display the picture without  me writing any code.

I also was able to reduce the picture JPEG quality to 2% with that shrinking an average thumbnaul picture (Quality 70 %) from 4K to 1K. This is exactly what  I was up to.

-Michael

17

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / TD4 Squeezer Tool

« on: 2017-04-21 02:34:41 »

Being hit by the Access database 2 GByte limit, I am doing a TD4 squeezer Tool. (Which I of course will share when it's ready and which supposedly also can be mofified to support tpdb8 files.)

The goal is to have the user collect would-be "old" thumbnails in a Gallery and then run the Squeezer that will reduce the space by applying an extremely strong JPEG compression on the selected thumbnail pictures. Same would be displayed a lot less nice in thumbnail view, but could be recreated by just hitting F3.

Maye this is not possible, then the tool will either remove the selected thumbnail pictures or replace them by some very small default picture.

My program already can access the database and find and load the data of the selected thumnail picture information.

Now I found that this information is not a full JPF file content, but supposedly just the pixel information without the JPEG header. This information supposedly is given in some other fields of the thumbnail record.

Does anybody know a definition of this information, so that I can manage it ?

Thanks,
-Michael

18

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database upgrade

« on: 2017-04-04 01:15:45 »

>Sorry to hear it.. you'd think that size wouldn't be an issue if you choose to use external thumbnails.

Don't be. This is exactly what I expected, as the process starts b copying the TD4 database file instead of creating an empty new one.

>You can probably work around this by making a copy of your TD4 database, setting its thumbnail size to 40x40p (the minimum) and rescanning your images. That should greatly reduce its size.

I might give that a try. But to be in better control of this process, right now my strategy is to create a program that attaches to the TD4 database and resizes and/pr recompresses with a very high jpg compression rate only those thumbnails that had been included in a predefined gallery.

OTOH I doubt that the database engine in fact instantly will free the space taken by the overridden BOLBs. I suppose only a "compress" process will decrease the databases size.


-Michael

19

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database upgrade

« on: 2017-04-03 19:07:12 »

Hi Daan

Just for the record.

I tried TP10's TD4 conversion option with creating the thumbnail pictures as separate files. This should result in a very small "Access"-type database.

After more than an hour of creating the pictures the process failed with a "database full" error. Obviously the database - which is copied before starting the conversion - is not compacted before enhancing it by the addition of the new TP10 fields.

-Michael

20

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Correction!

« on: 2017-04-01 12:58:47 »

>Oops! Michael, I made a mistake. I mistakenly thought that when you press Shift-Del, the thumbnail record (with keywords, etc) is preserved but only the thumbnail image is stripped from it. This is NOT true - the whole thumbnail record is deleted.

I found this out very soon. so no damage done :)

It in fact would be nice function to be able to delete only the selected Tumbnail jpg from the database and leave the rest of the record in place or - even better - convert selected jpg thumbnails to very tightly compressed versions.

But unfortunately AFAIK, TP7 does not have this feature.

This said, a maybe nice idea would be to do an external program working on the TD4 database, and deletes or converts all jpg thumbnails that are assigned to a dedicated gallery. Supposedly this is a lot easier to do than doing a .TP4 to .TPDB8s converter like I initially was up to.

-Michael

21

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database upgrade

« on: 2017-04-01 02:15:26 »

I know. (Doing so right now...)

Just no idea how many will be necessary to be deleted.

-Michael

22

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database upgrade

« on: 2017-03-31 17:31:55 »

>Yesterday I tried the 'SQLite Manager' plug-in for Firefox and I loaded a ThumbsPlus 10 ....

That is a very useful information !

>First use TP10 to convert your TP7 database to an Access compatible .TPDB8 database ...

That is impossible, as the .TPDB8 will be bigger than the .TP4 and the TP4 already is 2 GByte. (We are just trying to remove unnecessary pictures, which is a lot of work.)

If that would be possible, instead of SQLite, we also could use the TP10 feature to hold the thumbnail pictures a separate files with the .TPDB8 database.

Thanks anyway

23

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database upgrade

« on: 2017-03-29 13:04:51 »

Hi Daan

I was able to do a program that attaches to a TP10 SQLite database and reads the Table names and the columns names:


Host
 - idHost
 - hostname
sqlite_sequence
 - name
 - seq
Username
 - idUser
 - username
UserSettings
 - idUser
 - section
 - key
 - value
ActiveUsers
 - idActive
 - idUser
 - idHost
 - session
 - starttime
 - lasttime
 - lastactive
 - lastquery
FoundLists
 - idList
 - ListName
 - TableName
 - SQLText
FindCriteria
 - idList
 - key
 - value
FoundThumbs
 - idList
 - idThumb
 - flags
Gallery
 - idGallery
 - name
 - sortorder
 - descend
Keyword
 - idKeyword
 - keyword
Volume
 - idVol
 - vtype
 - serialno
 - maxcomplen
 - vchar
 - filesystem
 - label
 - netname
 - alias
Path
 - idPath
 - idVol
 - pathtype
 - name
Thumbnail
 - idThumb
 - idPath
 - idFiletype
 - file_time_iso
 - thumbnail_time_iso
 - taken_time_iso
 - filelength
 - checksum
 - width
 - height
 - horiz_res
 - vert_res
 - colortype
 - colordepth
 - gamma
 - thumbnail_width
 - thumbnail_height
 - thumbnail_type
 - thumbnail_size
 - idUser
 - idHost
 - name
 - rating
 - xmp
 - metric1
 - metric2
 - md5
 - thumbnail
 - annotation
 - metric3
UserFields
 - idThumbUDF
UserFieldsInfo
 - Version
 - FieldName
 - ColName
 - ColType
 - ColLength
 - FieldSeq
ThumbnailGallery
 - idGallery
 - idThumb
 - seq
ThumbnailKeyword
 - idThumb
 - idKeyword
ThumbsPlusDatabase
 - attribute
 - value

24

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database upgrade

« on: 2017-03-28 16:04:11 »

Hi Daan.

I did a program that attaches to the TP109 SQLite database and shows the "Table names". Here I get this list:

Host
sqlite_sequence
Username
UserSettings
ActiveUsers
FoundLists
FindCriteria
FoundThumbs
Gallery
Keyword
Volume
Path
Thumbnail
UserFields
UserFieldsInfo
ThumbnailGallery
ThumbnailKeyword
ThumbsPlusDatabase

I suppose I need to find the name of the fields in the tables, as e.g. "Thumbnail" obviously has fields like "width", "height", ... (see below).  


OTOH when exporting the database to a file in TP10 I get the header:

"Volume.label",
"Volume.serialno",
"Volume.vtype",
"Volume.netname",
"Volume.filesystem",

"Path.name",,

"Thumbnail.checksum",
"Thumbnail.width",
"Thumbnail.height",
"Thumbnail.horiz_res",
"Thumbnail.vert_res",
"Thumbnail.colortype",
"Thumbnail.colordepth",
"Thumbnail.gamma",
"Thumbnail.thumbnail_width",
"Thumbnail.thumbnail_height",
"Thumbnail.thumbnail_type",
"Thumbnail.thumbnail_size",
"Thumbnail.name",
"Thumbnail.metric1",
"Thumbnail.pcomment",
"Thumbnail.pbits",

"Keywords.pkeywords",

"Galleries.galleries",


This dos not seem very congruent :(  

And the PDF you pointed me to - showing the "ThumbsPlus v9 .tpdb8 (Access type) database structure" looks very different.

I can't even check whether the exported Text file is correct, as TP10 declines to import it. Supposedly the implementation of the export and/or import function is not yet correct.

Any further comment ?

Thanks a lot,
-Michael

25

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database upgrade

« on: 2017-03-25 10:26:09 »

I wrote as well a mail to Cerious support, as to Laura in person. Maybe they will come up with something workable.

-Michael

26

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database upgrade

« on: 2017-03-25 10:23:18 »

>If the galleries are all you really need, I think I'd go for the tedious approach of using IPTC keywords (in my first paragraph above). It seems the most simple solution and I don't think much can go wrong with it, except that the repetitive job will drive you nuts :-))

I am not sure what else is used but the galleries, but I can't take the risk that something does not work after the conversion.

In fact your approach will loose the sorting of the galleries, so it does not really help :(

-Michael

27

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database upgrade

« on: 2017-03-25 09:23:53 »

BTW. Thanks a lot for you effort helping me. But exactly at this point we already have been several months ago. I did try to convert the - at that time still a lot smaller - database to TPDB8 format and failed.

Of course the TP10 trial period has long since expired, so that I can't do any further experiments :(

Up til now I did not try to get a license for TP10, as it's not given (or even likely) that we will be able to use it.

-Michael

28

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database upgrade

« on: 2017-03-25 09:17:12 »

> TP7 doesn't support SQLite.
Bad news. I had assumed that after creating an SQLIte database, TP7 would be able to use it's SQL interface to access it.

>If your images are JPG/TIF/PNG, you could use the TP7 IPTC editor to copy your keywords and annotations into the image files. Then create an SQLite3 database in TP10, thumbnail the images and have all this information copied into the database automatically.

The main purpose to use ThumbsPlus is the Galleries. We have hundreds of those. This information never is stored in the image files themselves.

> Another (experimental) approach would be to use a generic MDB-to-SQLite3 converter to see if that produces a working database.

OK. In fact I could do such a tool myself using some programming language that supports SQL access (e.g. Python).

>However, before trying that, you would first have to use TP10 to convert your .TD4 database to the current .TPDB8 format (from which you can then convert it to SQLite3),

I suppose as well .TD4 as .TPDB8 is for the "Access" engine. AFAIK it's not possible to do convert a "close-to full" TP7 "Access" database to TP 10 format, as some additional information will be stored and burst the 2 GB limit.

So I suppose the only way to go is to directly convert the .TD4 database in the correct TP4 SQLite format. I suppose I can do this by creating an appropriate converter that either accesses both databases to do a direct conversion or do a program that reads the text file exported by TP7 and converts it in a text file that can be imported by TP10. (I suppose TP10 does have a text file import, similar to what TP7 has.)

But to do this, I obviously would need to have a documentation about the fields, the databases use in both versions.

Possible but obviously very nasty reverse-engineering: I could create a small database with either version of TP (maybe for TP10 by converting the TD4 to TPDB8), do an export and compare the generated files, and then do a lot of experimenting. I do hope that Cerious does not intend to force me to do this.

What do you think ?
-Michael

29

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Database upgrade

« on: 2017-03-25 04:35:37 »

Hi Exert(s),

I am in a terrible need, as the old "Access" database engine, our TP7 setup (two users) uses hit the 2GB limit and TP is not usable any more.

Since years, we are planning to upgrade to a more recent version of TP using a more recent database engine. I even tried a Server based database (Postgres on a Linux box) but this was hard to set up and in the end a lot slower than the old "Access" stuff.

Unfortunately (according to some discussions in this forum), TP10 does not yet seem to provide a tool to import a TP7 Access type database to an SQLite Database.

Is there any help (other than installing a network server box with MSSQL) ? Either by upgrading to TP10, or by using TP7 with SQLite ?

-Michael

30

General Discussion / Why is building file list so slow on the desktop?

« on: 2017-03-04 16:45:22 »

How nicely the standard Linux file system can do this with hard and/or soft links since ever ...

In fact, AFAIK, the actual version of the Windows file system can do this as well (joins, ...)

-Michael