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41

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Interpolation/JPEG options used for Web Page Wizard thumbnails vs. batch mode

« Last post by Remigiusz on 2022-03-27 21:22:41 »

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out what specific interpolation options, JPEG compression parameters, etc. are used by the Web Page Wizard (Alt+F9) to generate thumbnails. What I'd like to be able to do is set up Batch Process to produce the same images, but so far the specific way Web Page Wizard creates them under the hood eludes me.

This is what I'm setting in the Web Page Wizard - that's all I *can* set as far as JPEG options go. No way to select downsampling interpolation or anything, only size and quality:



This is what I'm using for batch mode:



Source image is a TIFF.

The files end up having the same size in pixels, same basic metadata (quality, resolution, JPEG sampling factor, colorspace, whatever else ImageMagick's "idenfity -verbose" spews out), but they're not the same size in bytes and the resulting image is different, visibly so in some cases. Now, I tried changing interpolation and sub-sampling for batch mode, but it doesn't look like I'm getting the same result anyhow.

Now, you're probably asking "why would anyone want to be that particular about this?" and the answer is, the results we've been getting from the Web Page Wizard's thumbnail generation are so good and reliable for the specific types of images we handle that it's still in use over here long after server-side software became capable of generating its own thumbnails and we stopped actually using the generated webpages themselves - however, this approach is becoming increasingly unwieldy and impractical, for a multitude of reasons you can probably guess yourself. Thus, I've been trying to re-create the Web Page Wizard results in Batch Mode, under the assumption that this is what's actually being used under the hood.

The next step would be to either use Python scripting to integrate that batch flow with an automatic upload to a server - or to use the known set of batch mode options to further re-create the result with ImageMagick, which can be then integrated into server-side software and finally get automatic thumbnails that are not crap within the online store itself.

So, what's the exact magic behind Web Page Wizard's thumbnails? Anyone?

42

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Re: Scan folder error '5019 the background task failed with exception c0000005.'

« Last post by Daan van Rooijen on 2022-02-15 02:17:20 »

My pleasure, I'm glad it was solved. I've had the same problem myself a few times!

43

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Re: Scan folder error '5019 the background task failed with exception c0000005.'

« Last post by AndreJS on 2022-02-14 22:09:12 »

Thank you so much!!! You said something that gave me a light! As I had splitted before the main folder in many others to see if I could scan each one entirely, I found there was only one the scan wasn't completing. So I searched where the thumbnails creation was interrupted and 'voilą'!! There was an '.mpg' file lost in the middle of all genuine jpgs ones. By removing it I could complete the thumbnails scan. Thank you for your valuable help! Best regards!

44

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Re: Scan folder error '5019 the background task failed with exception c0000005.'

« Last post by Daan van Rooijen on 2022-02-14 21:30:16 »

I'd try setting the sorting order (of the thumbnail display) to 'None', and not use either of the 'thumbnails first' or 'thumbnails last' sorting options.  Then go into the folder that was scanned. The first file that has not been thumbnailed correctly is probably the one that caused the error. It's probably a file that requires a plug-in (raw files, pdf, etc) or some other external module (e.g. a zip file). Once you have identified that file, you can temporarily rename or move it, so that you can hopefully complete the thumbnailing with no further errors.

45

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Scan folder error '5019 the background task failed with exception c0000005.'

« Last post by AndreJS on 2022-02-14 21:04:42 »

Please, if anyone could give me some help...

I'm receiving '5019 the background task failed with exception c0000005' error when scanning a ~40k photos folder (~1.8GB).

I'm using a sqlite3 database with 80 quality jpg compression. Database stats shows ~22k thumbnails records and has ~117MB total file size.

I can't get over 56% of scanning process - the task stops with the error above.

My hardware has 32GB RAM, i9-10th gen processor and SSD, so I guess it's not a lack of hardware resource issue.

Thank you!

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ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Re: Built new PC, transferred TP10 and now it runs like a dog

« Last post by Daan van Rooijen on 2022-02-02 09:41:49 »

Interesting, and maybe it will help someone else. Thanks again!

47

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Re: Built new PC, transferred TP10 and now it runs like a dog

« Last post by nzmike on 2022-02-02 03:12:31 »

I was just googling about general ODBC connections to third party apps (so not TP specific) and a couple of sites said to use the new driver.  It  could be something to do with the fact I also upgraded to SQL Server 2019 for my new PC, perhaps the native driver is just not tuned for the new version because my old PC (on SQL 2017)   used the native driver and it was very fast.

48

ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Re: Built new PC, transferred TP10 and now it runs like a dog

« Last post by Daan van Rooijen on 2022-02-01 20:04:31 »

Then from a bit more googling I realised I needed to set up the system DNS using the ODBC for SQL Server 2017 driver rather than the native SQL Server driver.

Great to hear that it's working properly again, and thanks for getting back with the solution. If you remember where you read about that solution, I'd be curious to read it too -- do you still have the link? Was it specific to ThumbsPlus or was it a more generic solution for SQL-based databases?

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ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Re: Built new PC, transferred TP10 and now it runs like a dog

« Last post by nzmike on 2022-02-01 19:35:33 »

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.   

I had installed from an older TP10 .exe file so re-installed the latest version from the site.
Then from a bit more googling I realised I needed to set up the system DNS using the ODBC for SQL Server 2017 driver rather than the native SQL Server driver.  Once I restarted TP and connected to the new DB everything was back to normal as running as fast I expected :-)

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ThumbsPlus v10 Questions / Re: Built new PC, transferred TP10 and now it runs like a dog

« Last post by pie.photo on 2022-02-01 11:34:14 »

Another suggestion ..
Create a new (native, not connected by ODBC) database only for testing if it also is too slow. So you could narrow down if the cause is in the database or somewhere else. You only need to import some directories to compare the times.
To give you some measured times to compare:
I have a local (but not very fast) SATA-disk with all my image files. The database (PostgreSQL over ODBC) runs on the fast M.2 system drive. To show all 223320 image files (Include Child Folders) with TP 10 it takes about 8.5 seconds.
The total number of files in this directory is much higher (374205) because there are also XMP-, RAW- and some other files which I do not include in the database.

I also have a NAS box (connected with 1Gb Ethernet) with 259095 image files. On the same NAS-box is running the PostgreSQL database (over ODBC). To show all files it takes about 2 minutes and 18 seconds. The last 30 seconds of this time are needed for "scanning" thumbnails.
Hope you can find the reason soon!
Ernst