Thumbnails continually rebuilding

[ycardozo]

I got an update for ACR (CS6) today and installed it. Suddenly, EVERY time I open Bridge or return to it from another page, it starts thumbnailing my images from scratch. We're talking hundreds of images in this folder. This is new. It did not do this yesterday. What is going on and how do I fix it.  If I leave bridge (even if it's still open) and I go back to Bridge, it starts doing the thumbnail extractions all over again and THEN starts on the full size extractions all over again. The result is that all of Photoshop has slowed to a crawl. This is the second time in a month that an update has caused new problems that did not exist before. It's beyond frustrating.

that's cute. I just sat through 10 minutes of full size extractions counting down. it got to zero and STARTED AGAIN. Okay, guys, what's going on? I have 50 gb of images from Asia I need to process. I truly don't have time for this. And the thumbnail extractions just started over again.

Message title was edited by: Brett N

[ycardozo]

I finally found the place to click to get emails from the other forum. Anyway, Jeff said he doesn't have a clue. I was hoping he works for Adobe, but he does not. I don't know what else to say except this started with the update to 7.3. I am on Windows 7, shooting Canon 7D. I called a friend who uses Nikon and she is on 7.3 and hasn't had the problem. BUT...she does not work in the metadata template from bridge, she fills in the template while working on the image in photoshop (file/info, etc). Whether that makes a difference, whether it's a problem limited to Canon, or even just the 7D, I don't  have a clue. But I am losing patience with this whole situation. Others have replicated the problem. Others have complained Adobe needs to fix it. And considering the problems I had replacing the.8bi file on my own, I won't touch an update until I know for sure the problem has been addressed and fixed. Considering what we pay for Adobe products, it's really inexcusable not to have fixed this. We're going on six months with this.

[Chris_Crevasse]

I have no clue what the problem is except that it's not limited to Canon.  I have been experiencing the same issue with Sony RX1 raws converted to DNG on import.  My procedure has been the same for years: convert raw to DNG on import and add metadata at that time, delete unwanted images, batch rename files, add keywords.  I was only vaguely aware of when the constant rebuilding of thumbnails began, but it has been going on for several weeks now.  In my case, it is always nine unknown thumbnails, plus whatever new thumbnails need to be created.  If I delete a file, it starts rebuilding nine thumbnails, slowly.  If I open a file and close it without changes, it rebuilds nine thumbnails.  And while this is happening, everything else slows to a crawl.  At this point I've tried creating new folders, purging the cache, rebuilding the cache, compacting the cache, and re-setting my preferences.  I've updated to ACR 7.4.  Nothing has solved the problem.

[Robert_Shomler]

A test with acr 7.4 and 7.2:

Installed acr 7.4 update (over 7.4 rc).  Opened Bridge to a folder of 75 cr2 files, 42 with acr edits (xmp files), 18 files displayed in content

Bridge regenerated 19 cache files.  Status bar reported extracting thumbnails, both thumbs and previews were regenerated in cache (cache 256 and 1024 folders).

Then I navigated to a folder with 10 cr2 files, two with acr edits, no other added metadata.   Every time I touched / selected a file in content the two files with acr edits world be regenerated In cache, both thumbs and previews.

Reverted to acr 7.2 - no cache updates when navigating selections among previews.  Then (in 7.2)  applied one star rating via ctrl-1 to a cr2.  This caused cache update (and of course xmp file update) even though there was no need to regen cache image.  

Then removed the one star rating by clicking on rating block in content (image block).  Xmp update as expected, but no cache update.  Reapplied one star rating by clicking on star in image preview block.  Again xmp update, but no cache update.  In this test, looks like keyboard shortcut to apply one star caused cache regen while applying one star by clicking in content image block did not cause cache change.

Returned to first folder of 75 cr2 files.  Bridge regenerated 8 cache files (first access with acr 7.2) then did not regenerate cache for other select, navigate and view in bridge operations (the ones that caused regen with 7.4).

[ycardozo]

That was incredibly thorough and I am a bit confused. But please tell me, Robert, bottom line ... does this mean the recalibration problem remains with 7.4? It certainly appears so.  I am still curious about whether this also actually happens with anything other than Canon CR2 files. My friend with the Nikon has not had the problem with 7.3, though (and I wonder if this means anything), she works on her metadata template in Photoshop rather than in Bridge.

Thank you so much for all your work on this. It seems to appear that the problem remains. And Adobe really needs to address it. How can they not? Please someone with Adobe who is following this, answer why the problem has not been addressed.

[Robert_Shomler]

ycardozo wrote:

That was incredibly thorough and I am a bit confused. But please tell me, Robert, bottom line ... does this mean the recalibration problem remains with 7.4? It certainly appears so.

I'd say yes.  My experience is that the Bridge cache regeneration problem that I observed with Bridge+acr 7.3 is unchanged - still observed with Bridge+acr 7.4.

I am still curious about whether this also actually happens with anything other than Canon CR2 files.  My friend with the Nikon has not had the problem with 7.3, though (and I wonder if this means anything), she works on her metadata template in Photoshop rather than in Bridge.

Post 235 in this thread reports observing problem with Sony raw files.  Re how metadata is added, I don't know if that influences conditions.  At one time problem folder seemed to be triggered after updating File Info from Bridge (right click > File Info....), but I've observed problem when  Bridge added metadata via template (Append or Replace metadata).   I also observed Bridge unnecessary cache regeneration for cr2 files when acr edit were the only added metadata (to what came from camera in cr2 file).  

[ycardozo]

So, SIGH, how do we get adobe to pay attention to this. Steve G was extremely helpful but he is apparently overwhelmed with other work. His comment, or words to this effect, was that he would try to pass all this on to someone else  but, frankly, that we shouldn't hold our breaths. In any other realm of business, anything this problematic or widespread would be unexceptable.

[Yammer]

As someone who has worked in technical support, I'd say that, for a problem like this, one of the best ways of getting it fixed is making it universely reproducible. If it's seen to affect all users in certain conditions, then its priority may be increased.

I went through this in this forum some time ago. Same problem, but much less severe. At one stage, I thought it was related to crops, but I could never prove it. It was probably CS4 at the time! I'll see if I can find the discussion.

You could also try setting up a bug in the feedback site, getting people to +1 the bug, but I never had much success with that. I think that the Bridge team may be understaffed.

You could try making a stink on Twitter. Some companies respond well to bad PR on Twitter. It depends on company attitude. Try to be reasonable though.

Getting staff to read this discussion wouldn't help, as it is far too long and full of chatter. They just want the symptoms, the means to recreate the problem, and an indication of how widespread it is. It might be worth starting another, and asking people not to comment unnecessarily.

Edit: my mistake, this was related to the metadata writing error.

[ycardozo]

This situation would be totally unacceptable in any business that was not a monopoly. Enough people have replicated this problem. I personally am not on Twitter but if someone else wants to give it a try....

Basically, this means until the problem is fixed, I can't update from where I am which is Photoshop CS6, RAW 7.2.

[Yammer]

ycardozo, you are wasting your breath. This is a user-to-user forum, and Adobe people rarely come in here. We all agree with you, but there's no point complaining in here.

If the problem was more widely seen then you may have a chance. Truth is, lots of people don't even use Bridge, and those that do may not use it in the same way as those experiencing the problem.

As I already said, your best chance is finding a way to recreate the problem and getting everyone to try it. If we all see the same problem, then Adobe will have to take notice. I'll certainly help, but I'm snowed under at the moment.

[ycardozo]

Sadly, I don't exactly have a large social media following. You suggested twitter. I don't do that, either. You say the best chance is to find a way to recreate the problem. Um, hasn't that already been done? You simply create an .xmp metadata file in 7.3 and voila, there it is. At least, it is with Canon and Sony raw files. I know for a fact that someone with Adobe HAS recreated the problem. But he, also, is snowed under. Until these last few comments, I thought someone from Adobe did keep an eye on this forum. At least, they did late last year when I was having the initial battles with this problem. My next step is to have a conversation with an editor I work with at Getty. Maybe Getty doing some complaining will be enough to get Adobe's attention.

[Guest]

ycardozo,

I agree 100% with yammer.  I have contacted a couple a folks at Adobe, they said they would look into it, but nothing happens.  You need something simple, not a thread of over 200 entires, not the statement "other users have replicated the problem".  It is not clear enough for an outsider to feret out the exact problem.  They need step A, B, C, D. 

Do some experimentation: does it do it with all raw images, all metadata, or just some metadata?  Experiment, and see if you can narrow down problem so it occurs every time.  Keep it simple.  When this is done  outline a step by step procedure that exposes the flaw, make these steps generic for others to use.  Send a Personal Message to Robert Shomler and enlist his help, as he sees same problem (apologies to Robert if he opts out).

Start a new thread and post procedure asking others to use it.  Post a link to this thread as a reference.  I will try it with a NEF, and hopefully others will try with their raw images and we can see if it only happens with cr2 or other formats as well.

I know you say you don't have the computer skills to risk going to ACR 7.3 to do this.  But if you are not willing to do what it takes to move this issue forward, the issue may never get addressed.  Adobe is not going to jump in a fix it without significant user input.  There are flaws in Bridge and Photoshop that have been around for generations, and will likely remain there unless Adobe sees it as a problem.

[ycardozo]

It took me a full week and someone from Adobe to get me back to 7.2. I honestly, do not intend to risk bringing my business to a total standstill again. Please, if someone else out there can do this, do it. For me, it happens EVERY TIME IN EVERY FOLDER if a single image has an .xmp file. Period. If there's no metadata .xmp sidecar, the rebuilding does not happen. That's it. I have sent descriptions from people on this forum to the one person I know who works for Adobe. The descriptions were thorough and to the point. I just don't see the need to do this again and donate days, maybe weeks of my business time if someone else can do this without getting into computer trouble. Please let us know if this also happens with Nikon NEF files. The one person I know using Nikon has not seen the problem but she does her metadata in Photoshop rather than Bridge. I would be interested in knowing if that makes a difference.

[Guest]

I have been reading this thread, but have to admit I can not give a 1, 2, 3 step procedure to show problem.  In Post #236 Robert did a test, but I am not really sure what it said as I have not repeated it.  Even you in Post #237 said you were confused.  Perhaps you, or someone, needs to condense the thread to a simple if you take A and do B you see C.

From Roberts description "Then I navigated to a folder with 10 cr2 files, two with acr edits, no other added metadata.   Every time I touched / selected a file in content the two files with acr edits world be regenerated In cache, both thumbs and previews." 

So if you stay in the same folder and select the file again, does it blank out and regenerate a new thumbnail each time? For the whole folder or just that image?

If you take a jpeg and edit in ACR does it also exhibit the same problem? 

I am not an early adopter so think I am on ACR 7.2.  Don't use it much so no need to update.

[ycardozo]

Perhaps a more thorough description of what happened to me will help.

I am working, as I've said, in Windows 7, using Canon 7D and G11 camers and shooting in RAW. When I updated from Camera Raw 7.2 to 7.3 last November, the rebuilding started. It happened only with RAW files that had associated .xmp sidecar files. I created a test folder with 10 RAW files that were untouched...in other words, I had added no information whatsoever in the metadata. That folder did NOT rebuild. But any folders that had even a single image with metadata would rebuild. What would happen is in the place where you see how many images there are in a folder (how I have it set up, the information appears in the lower left hand corner of the screen at the bottom of the metadata info), it would rebuild. It wouldn't rebuild every image, but rather, would pick a random number ... say30 or 15 or nine out of say, 50 images, and laborously grind through the smaller and larger thumbnails. When it was done, the rebuilding would sometimes stop and sometimes not. There was no consistency to the number rebuilt or whether it would start over or not. BUT... even if the rebuilding stopped, all I had to do was leave the page and it started all over again. That is it. Nothing more.

This ONLY happens with RAW files. Not with jpegs. Not with tiffs.

Please let me know if this helps.

[Hudechrome]

I believe you need additional tools to do the trouble shoot. I know that working at Intel doing validation, sightings that may wind up as bugs do not always do so because the problem is with the person and the sighting, not the software itself. The troubleshooting tools narrow down the options but one still has to figure it out themselves, unless it actually is a bug.

Perhaps learning the tools from Sysinternals might be a path, but the learning curve is steep. It is clear to me that there is a process running common to certain setups and users but not all.

I did have a problem with 7.4 but is was moi, as usual.

I do not see this one at all.

The problem I had with 7.4 consisted of the fact that ACR was pointing to the cache being on one drive, but Bridge was pointed to another drive. I also could not set Bridge to default because I had Bridge set up at Startup. My fingers were not fast enough. So I corrected both situations and now things are back to normal. Why Bridge and ACR got to cross purposes I haven't much of a clue, nor do I know for certain that really is the problem. I am not willing to reset both to different drives to see if I can regenerate the problem. (That's what Adobe techs are for, imo anyway.)

Another example: I spent most of this weekend chasing down problems running my new D7100. One problem I was certain was Nikon's. I wrote to support, outlining the problem precisely (or so I thought!) and the answer I received indicated the tech probably didn't bother to carefully read what I wrote. In the meantime, I figured it out as an operating manual problem;, connecting the dots over a rather huge operating manual. And I thought it was a bug! More like sloppy manual writing.

The answers many times are in front of one but it takes stepping back and letting it lie for a bit.

[Yammer]

I'm very rusty, but I just had a bash at some Camera Raw version storing and changing scripts for Windows. I have built in some rudimentary checking, and it works okay on my Windows 7 Pro 64 bit set-up. I claim no responsibility for any problems resulting from using them; use at your own risk.

If you have any basic knowledge of Windows command line syntax, you might want to look them over first. Feel free to improve them, or port them to another scripting language. The scripts assume that CS6 is installed in the default location on the C drive.

From the zip file (link below), extract two CMD scripts, CRSTORE and CRCHANGE.

Copy them to your Windows command path. I copied them to C:\Windows\System32.

Start an elevated Command Prompt (run as Administrator). One way is: Windows key, type CMD, press Ctrl-Shift-Enter, click Yes.

Run CRSTORE or CRCHANGE as follows...

CRSTORE number

This stores the current version of Camera Raw, with a number of your choosing, for safe keeping.

e.g. CRSTORE 74 - stores a copy of the current Camera Raw plug-in with the label 74

CRCHANGE storenumber

This copies the stored version of Camera Raw over the current Camera Raw plug-in. Clearly, you should ensure that the current plug-in is stored first, if you ever want to use it again.

e.g. CRCHANGE 72 - replaces your current Camera Raw plug-in with one you previously stored with the label 72.

Practical usage? Before updating Camera Raw, store the current version (e.g. if you are running 7.2, run CRSTORE 72). Then update Camera Raw. After Camera Raw has been updated, store the new version (e.g. assuming you are now on 7.4, run CRSTORE 74). You now have two backups (7.2 and 7.4) as well as the working plug-in. If you want to revert to an older version, use CRCHANGE to go back (e.g. CRCHANGE 72 to go back to 7.2).

Here are the scripts (click here)

[Hudechrome]

Looks interesting, Yammer. Can it be run as a bat file from the desktop?

[Yammer]

Hudechrome wrote:

Looks interesting, Yammer. Can it be run as a bat file from the desktop?

Sort of.

Both scripts need to be run as Administrator in order to copy/replace the files, and both scripts need a parameter. So you you can't run them 'as is'.

However, you could create a shortcut of CRCHANGE on the desktop, then edit the Target property to add the store number, and update the Advanced property to 'Run as Administrator'. Double-clicking the shortcut will update Camera Raw to the Target version.

You could duplicate this shortcut a number of times, changing the Target property for different store numbers, and changing the shortcut name appropriately. You can then swap between Camera Raw versions by double-clicking the appropriate shortcut.

It's a bit fiddly, but I'm not up to writing a nice little Windows application.

[Hudechrome]

Thanks. I didn't expect it to be able to run .bat as is.

I've already considered the shortcut method, which I'll likely implement.  I have the problem of remembering where I put things and what they are named, which is why important stuff goes on the desktop.

[Yammer]

Here's a test that anyone can try. I can recreate this quite reliably, so it would be good to know if others see something similar.

* Make a Collection of about 500–1000 Raw photos. I just picked a few folders at random and added them to a Collection until I had enough.

* Set Bridge to Generate HQ on demand (top right square icon) [this may not be necessary]

* Select all of the photos in the Collection, right-click, and select Generate High Quality Thumbnails (if available). Wait until the process is finished and the spinning circle has gone, keeping Bridge in the foreground. This may take a while.

Now, if you switch to another application, like a web browser, even for a moment, and then switch back to Bridge, you might see the status say "(xx thumbnail extractions)" counting down to none. Switch away and back, and it does it again, as many times as you try.

With ACR 7.2 I always get a significant number of extractions, but with ACR 7.4 I get about 4 times as many!
I've tried this on two sets of Raw images, and, in both cases, 7.4 starts at about 32% of the number of items, and 7.2 starts at about 8%.

It's no wonder I was getting frustrated with my collection of 9000 images.

[Yammer]

Yammer P wrote:

it would be good to know if others see something similar.

Seriously, nobody?

[Hudechrome]

I haven't had time to try it.

[Guest]

I would try it with NEF but after a search could only round up less than 50.  Most of my shots are jpeg as I only use raw for "difficult" images.  Even those I edit and convert to jpeg, then nuke the raw.

[Chris_Crevasse]

My rebuilding problem stopped when I began working in a new folder.  I don't know what the issue was with the prior (March) folder or with the files within it, but I am not (yet) experiencing the rebuilding problem in my April folder, even though both folders contain the same types of files, and those files have been treated in the same way.

[ycardozo]

You don't need 500 raw files to replicate this problem. ten does the job just fine. or 50 if you want a larger number