Category information lost

[XnTom]

Dear all,
hopefully somebody can release me from the panic that just struck me, because after having to move my private photo data to another drive I seem to have lost all category information. Here is the story:

My PC used to have two physical drives for data, because it is used as private PC as well as for the job and I wanted to keep the data separate.
Private data is kept on drive D: including my photos. Everything that has to do with photography is stored in the folder D:\Foto.
This includes a folder called D:\Foto\XNViewMP. All paths in the preferences of XNViewMP have been set to this path.
Job data and all PortableApps - including XNViewMP - are stored on and operated from drive E: This seems to be a bit inconsistent but is has to do with backup strategy and the fact that all drives are encrypted volumes and I let my private drive dissappear when working outside, e.g. at a customer's office.

Everything worked perfect until I decided to move the complete folder \Foto from D: to a new separate drive F:, because the amount of photo data started to become too big. Now I have a separate drive only for my photo stuff.

After I moved the complete folder and changed the respective paths in the XNView preferences, everything seemd to be normal apart from the fact that all XNVievMP does not show the selected categories for my photos.
If I browse a directoy of my photos I can see the complete and correct category hierarchy in the category window, but if I select a photo that had categories allocated all tick boxes remain empty and the entire category tree is greyed out and I can not even set a category for one of my photos.

For completeness sake I want to mention that I have a complete backup of my data for the time before changing the drive configuration and movng the photo data folder. Thus, getting ini files or db filed back is not a problem. Nevertheless it would be really nice to find a solution without having to undo the complete configuration change and redo it again.

Is there anybody out there who could help me with restoring my category information ?
Any help is highly welcome.

Best regards

Thomas

[xnview]

Everything worked perfect until I decided to move the complete folder \Foto from D: to a new separate drive F:, because the amount of photo data started to become too big. Now I have a separate drive only for my photo stuff.

Do you have moved the folder outside XnView MP?
Do you use embedded metadata or only catalog?

Is there anybody out there who could help me with restoring my category information ?

Please send me the .db and i'll fix it

[XnTom]

Good morning and thanks a lot for the quick response.

To answer your questions first:

Q1: Yes, I have moved the folder outside XNViewMP.

Your question makes me think that this may have been my mistake. If I am sorting pictures and move them around I do it inside XNViewMP.
Because of the amount of data (app. 0,7 TB !) and the fact that there is other data regarding photography in this path as well (documentation, Excel sheets etc.) I didn't even think of doing it inside XNViewMP.

Q2: I use emedded data AND the catalog.
I use emdedded data are only for
- photographers name
- copyright information
- the rating meta data (colored stars and bullets) and
- information regarding the source of information if it is a photo or graphic I found somewhere else or one of my photos shows something like that.

For being able to find photos, I use only the catalog with a hierarchical strucutre of categories.

Around midnight I got to a state where categories seem to have found their way back. What I did was two things:

1. In order not to let the database grow too much I hat excludet all drives and paths that may contain photos and graphics for whatever reason that I don't want in my catalog. After a while I found out that also F:\ was listed as excluded, i.e. the drive where I moved the photos. I removed this entry for exclusions

2. I took the XNView.db and the Thumb.db from my latest backup and tried an import of the category database.

After restarting XNViewMP it seems like the category information is back again. I hope I find the time later today to take closer look to ensure that the category information is back and complete and correct. At least the two db files that XNViewMP uses seem to look from their size and modifications are written to the right place, i.e. the db files in F:\Foto\XNViewMP.

If I find things that do not look right, I really appreciate your offer to take a look at my db files.

I must admit that I just gave it a try - which obviously was a bit naiv -, but is there a summary of how to proceed when moving large amount of data around in case of this kind of configuration change of a computer, moving photos to a NAS, etc. and what are the Do's and Don'ts in this situation ?

[XnTom]

Good morning,

in the meantime I have checked the category information in more detail and it looks like evernything is back to normal again.
May be I corrected one user failure with another one but the measures taken seem to have solved the problem.

I hope the configuration will now stay like it is at the moment for a longer time. But next time I have to change something will make sure to move the photos inside XNViewMP

Best regards and thanks anyway

Thomas

[xnview]

you can move outside, but you need to change path of files in catalog

[woostermatt]

Hello. I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this question, but here goes. Hopefully someone ill see it and have an answer.

First: I am a newbie. I am loving XnView. It does ALL the things that no other program does. I can't wait to write some glowing reviews. (And send you some money! )

I'm hoping you can help me. My wife and I are tagging photos. Each of us have XnViewMP installed on our laptops, with the photo library on a network drive (in a folder called "Images") and both XnView files (XnView.db and Thumbs.db) located in a separate folder called "DB Files". The photo library is @3,500 images (avg 750k-1mb each). The image folder is about 3 gb total.

As I'm working, I occasionally use File Explorer to check the size of the files. Thumbs.db grows fastest (right now, about 199MB). XnView.db is only about 13MB. It seems to grow slower than Thumbs.db.

1) The XnView.db file size grows slower that Thumbs.db Is that normal?

2) Looking at the size of my Photos folder (3GB) do I need to tweak any settings so I can manage memory and prevent program problems?

Thanks in advance!

Matt

[xnview]

1) The XnView.db file size grows slower that Thumbs.db Is that normal?

yes, it stores thumbnails

2) Looking at the size of my Photos folder (3GB) do I need to tweak any settings so I can manage memory and prevent program problems?

you can keep default