Broken Thumbnails in PSE Organiser - How to View All (if any remain)

[johnc27475271]

Is there a way to tell Organiser to display all items whose thumbnail is broken (with icons looking like a sheet of paper that is ripped: excluding any "?" icons that show the need to reconnect links)?

Does organiser automatically start thumbnail generation at Start Up if it did not complete thumbnail generation before its previous shutdown?

Background to Questions:

I had been carefully importing various folders into a new Catalog on a new Windows 10  trial installation on my HP laptop (i5, 4GB RAM 120GB SSD). All went OK until about the third import where the "creating thumbnails" process stuck with a spinning circle  which showed progress something like "38746 of 48726". I left it overnight  but saw no change. Organiser would not respond to the close "X" (top right of window) and after forcing closure Organiser kept crashing on attempting startup (after briefly showing "Initialising Main Interface" and a very brief view of the Organiser main windows. Its Catalog apeared to be the problem as it would open a different Catalog OK. Because Windows 10 Update was badly broken on this laptop (thanks Microsoft) I put  a trial installation of PSE onto my new Dell laptop (i7, 16GB RAM, 512SSD) and started again from scratch.

Importing some folders into the Dell's PSE Organiser showed similar problems in that at least one folder got stuck with the thumbnail generation process showing (for example) 1075 of 1079. But after waiting some hours as a precaution  I could close PSE normally: it would restart without  a problem and without any apparent mention of generating thumbnails. I concluded the broken state of Windows 10 on my HP laptop was the reason for PSE refusing to close whilst trying to generate thumbnails but some thumbnail generation problem clearly remained. I wondered if any of my old files were corrupt (some came from recovery of a failed hard drive) and causing the thumbnail generator to "hang" so I paused my importing to investigate.

I scanned my image file collection with "Bad Peggy" (Freeware) which found around 500 files (out of about 154,000) to complain about. In particalar 8 were listed as "Truncated File - Missing EOI marker". 3 of these had been excluded automatically by PSE Organiser during Import as "Bad file (etc)" but one had been imported and the result was a "broken thumnail" icon. Viewed using Irfanview that particular  file had a small strip of the image missing (bottom right) and another of the 8 had a strip of the image across the bottom missing: 5 of the  8 could not be opened in Irfanview (including the 3 that PSE refused to import). I am happy to delete all 8 files (and remove from PSE catalog where already imported). But it would be very useful to get Organiser to show me if any other broken thumbnails exist (both now and when I finally complete Importing) - hence my first question above.

So far I have not spotted any problem with PSE file Import or Thumbnail generation in realtion to files flagged by Bad Peggy as:

"Not a JPEG file. Starts with" followed by one of: 0xEe 0xFF, 0x00 0x00, 0xFF 0xFF

"Java heap space" (probably some sort of error thrown by Java software used in Bad Peggy - may or may not matter)

I've removed from my collection the few files flagged by Bad Peggy as "Corrupt JPEG data" (4 variants) and I presume the one file flagged "Embedded colour profile is invalid: ignored" will not cause a problem when Imported...

[MichelBParis · Accepted solution]

Is there a way to tell Organiser to display all items whose thumbnail is broken (with icons looking like a sheet of paper that is ripped: excluding any "?" icons that show the need to reconnect links)?

No.

Does organiser automatically start thumbnail generation at Start Up if it did not complete thumbnail generation before its previous shutdown?

Yes.

First, Thanks for the useful information about Bad Peggy.

Thumbnail generation in the Organizer is not a simple extraction of the small one included in the original file itself, it has to show the edit settings  made with ACR either in the xmp sidecar or in the metadata header. That means opening (converting) each file. The resulting small image (240 x 360 max) is stored as a binary field in an sqlite database in the catalog (thumb.5.cache). That database holds tags and indexes to show the status of all processed thumbnails. So, if you are at ease with sql, you could create a query to find either not processed items or perhaps discarded ones (if you can find out the meaning of the tags).

In practice, broken thumbnails are a consequence of not being able to open some files (not supported formats, videos, corrupt or non strictly standard metadata as well as too big original pixel dimensions (max 30 000 on each side).

It happens that the thumbnail creation process no longer works as expected, then see:

Photoshop Elements (PSE) knowledge base.: How to correct hourglass (generic) thumbnail in Elements O...

Finding corrupt or non supported files by searching for broken thumbnails is not the only way in the organizer. For instance, a better way is to create a full backup. You'll get some messages or reports for wrong files.

[johnc27475271]

Many thanks again for your excellent prompt advice.

I needed to Backup everything once Importing completed so that I can Restore everything onto the iMac with both Catalog and Files in the correct folders of its HFS+ hard disk instead of being on the exFAT-formatted USB3 external drive I've been using on my Windows 10 machine. I've now used Organiser's Backup successfully and got no error messages so all seems well. It took about 11 hours to produce a 572GB backup folder, on the external USB3 drive,  from just over 153,000 media items.

PS In "cleaning" the historical photos data (all jpeg or tif except a few videos) I had to deal with pathnames that exceeded Windows' 260 character limit, despite copying everything directly to the root of the external hard drive. I found Treesize Pro very useful as you can set it to show in red all such pathnames. I also had to get rid of many empty folders (possibly left behind when byte-for-byte-identical files were removed) and for this "Remove Empty Directories" ("RED") was very useful.

PPS I may have a look at the sqlite database one day if I get the time - though I'm very rusty now on sql.