P: Random white images when exporting or publishing

[DaveInMelton]

I have just installed the 2015 CC edition of Light Room but am having problems publishing and exporting photographs. When either exporting to hard disk or publishing to FlickR, I'm getting 5 or 6 random, all white images.

[johnrellis]

There is clearly some kind of timing-dependent race condition here. I tried reproducing the problem with 1, 2, 4, and 8 CPUs active, and it only occurs for me with 8 CPUs active, with 1 or 2 blanks out of 125 exported. This suggests it's a classic concurrent-programming bug introduced in LR 6 when Adobe made the export pipeline more aggressively parallel.

[rd34sdf]

I have 8 cores on my CPU... it does looks like a racing condition, you may be on something!

[ssprengel]

For me the watermark needs to be graphical. I was using a 1012x789 JPG and see about a 1% white export rate.

[Eat My Pixels]

Hi Rikk for some reason when I started using LR CC this year before I was previously using a older version from a disc load and this had all my watermarks on presets when the new version was used some presets and transferred others had not 😞 so I had to start afresh with new watermarks .They still do not work sometimes blank file with just the wm on

[Eat My Pixels]

My WM 's have not changed from old version to this some are png some are jpg

[ssprengel]

My test was a brand-new JPG watermark preset. I didn't have any watermark presets, prior.

My raw files are on a USB-attached drive, my watermark JPG is on my C: drive and my export folder was also on the C: drive.

[DaveInMelton]

I have 8 cores on my CPU as well - and the problem only started after replacing the CPU / motherboard.

[DaveInMelton]

David - if exporting to JPEG, an easy way to check whether the image is OK is to sort by file-size. The faulty images are a lot smaller.

[DavidLukenbill]

Win 7 x64
JPEG
Graphical watermark
Not sure if small number of exports exhibits problem since almost always exporting large number.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Group:

I spent a large part of yesterday trying to duplicate this condition. I now have over 5000 JPEGs in the trash created while trying to duplicate the White - Watermark only JPEG file. I have, thus far, been unsuccessful.

I have tried batches from 50 to 750 images with Graphical watermarks (PNG and JPEG), Font-based and Simple watermarks. I have tried resizing the images and not resizing the images. I have run the groups on Win 7 SP1 and Win 8.1. So far, I have yet to see a single White JPEG as described here.

There is either a subtle point of export settings I am missing that is causing this or a system specific configuration.

If anyone wants to share with me via Email the following for testing:
1. Your Export Preset Used
2. Your Watermark Preset Used
3. The graphic used in creating your watermark
I will try and duplicate this again.

My email is flohr **at** adobe **dot** com

As a long shot, has anyone in this thread attempted to create a new preference file?
Close Lightroom - Hold down [Shift][Alt/Opt] while Restarting Lightroom. Overwrite the preferences when prompted?

[ssprengel]

This is what we can see mousing over your forum photo and it does not include your e-mail:

[ssprengel]

I reset my preferences before running the Export test.

The folder had 126 photos, mostly from my phone, and I got one white export.

Here are the relevant files, mostly importantly, the watermark preset and the Export preset. I renamed them so you can keep them straight and edited the watermark preset using Notepad to add the Sprengel_ prefix and saved with UTF-8.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9...

My yield is about 1% so I test with over 100 photos in a folder and expect 1.

After export, to test for white photos, use Windows Explorer, View--Large icons, Sort by Size, ascending, then right-click Preview on the first (smallest) image and if it is not white, then arrow through the first few.

Unless the originals are also very plain colors, the white export(s) will be at the beginning when sorted by size. The thumbnail will look ok but the full-screen Preview that via Windows Explorer will be white except for the watermark.

[Eat My Pixels]

really cannot understand how you have not found this bug when you exported WM images
The problem is present every time I use LR for this function as said by me the problem is completely random.

Never happened in the previous version only this new one

Is the CC version the same as buying a disc from the store ?

[rd34sdf]

The problem is probably due to a specific condition that occurs only on certain computer or computer/software. I have Lightroom 6 (not the CC version) and I still get the problem. BTW Steve, what type of computer you have, and how many cores on your CPU?

[Eat My Pixels]

Hi Richard
I have a Intel i7 2600
8 gig ram
64 bit windows 7
PC

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

The Watermark Preset Template is not recognized on my machine. The Export Template looks Ok.

[rd34sdf]

Thanks Steve! I checked the intel site and you have 4 cores/8 threads. By curiosity, you save to SSD drive or a normal drive?

[Eat My Pixels]

Hi
I save to normal Drive but use a SSD to run the program ( I Think) Lol

[rd34sdf]

ok thanks! I am pretty sure we all have something in common that make lightroom export blank photo...

[Eat My Pixels]

Yes the new version of LR 🙂 was fine with the old one

[rd34sdf]

You are right, it was also fine for me... 🙂

[johnrellis]

This smells very much like a timing-dependent, concurrent-programming bug, and as such, it will be highly dependent on your hardware configuration and LR's policies for utilizing multiple processors. The speed of your processors, memory, and disk, as well as other programs running on your system, affects these sorts of bugs. It isn't at all surprising that Rikk (or anyone else) wouldn't be able to reproduce it.

As I reported earlier, I can only get it to happen when I enable all 8 CPUs on my Macbook Pro (4 cores/8 processors). With 1, 2, or 4 CPUs, it didn't happen (or if it does happen, it happens less frequently).

While I didn't see any mention in Adobe's announcements, Victoria Bamptom wrote of LR CC: "Export speed has been improved, and it makes better use of multiple cores so you don’t have to manually queue up multiple exports.". People on the forums have reported LR 6, unlike LR 5, utilizing all their processors during an export. It's likely that LR has implemented a policy for controlling concurrent use of processors during exports, and the details of this policy, which we don't know, surely confound testing even further.

[rd34sdf]

I agree with you John. I save my export to 3 SSD in RAID5 for speed and I have a good computer built for speed also. I will try to save the files to a NAS (the network connection is a lot slower that internal SSD) and see if it makes a difference.

[Eat My Pixels]

You lost me there totally 🙂

[DaveInMelton]

My original files are stored on the internal hard disk.