XnView Software

Hi,

I just wanted to recreate all my thumbnails and so I went to Settings->Catalog->Cache maintenance and pressed "Delete all". After that all my stars where lost which was very painful because hours of work were simply lost. It is not comprehensible that the stars are deleted when deleting the thumbnails. Is there any way to bring my stars back?

Best regards

so you use only catalog to store rating, right?
'Delete all' delete ALL entries, not only thumbnails. For thumbnails, you have 'optimize...'

xnview wrote: Fri Dec 06, 2019 3:28 pm so you use only catalog to store rating, right?
'Delete all' delete ALL entries, not only thumbnails. For thumbnails, you have 'optimize...'

I was not aware of this either. Until now I believed that these setting have effect on the thumbnail cache not the entire catalog information.
The wording in that dialog is highly misleading because first checkbox it is referring to "Enable catalog" and below that it refers to "Enable thumbnail caching".
So when the dialog on the bottom says "cache maintenance" and "cache directory" you would believe it is referring to the "thumbnail cache" not to the "catalog".

I have just tried that with a copy and it is true, it deletes anything: Categories, ratings, colors. So you could lose days, months or years of work cataloging files.
I think this should be changed asap to reflect the real nature of this function as it does not "delete the cache" it deletes the catalog. A cache is something entirely different than the one and only master database holding all meta information.

I agree that is very misleading. Ive just lost my ratings from few catalogs <angry>. I was so confused, that in first place I lost my trust to XM and returned to my old catalog app and tried to find solution, that lead me here.
Now I have to check again thousands of my photos due to that "function"
Just writing to share my bad feelings and anger about it.

jadO wrote: Sun Dec 08, 2019 9:52 am The wording in that dialog is highly misleading because first checkbox it is referring to "Enable catalog" and below that it refers to "Enable thumbnail caching".
So when the dialog on the bottom says "cache maintenance" and "cache directory" you would believe it is referring to the "thumbnail cache" not to the "catalog".

It's ''catalog maintenance', not 'cache maintenance'

I think this should be changed asap to reflect the real nature of this function as it does not "delete the cache" it deletes the catalog. A cache is something entirely different than the one and only master database holding all meta information.

you have the warning dialog box before

xnview wrote: Fri May 01, 2020 8:03 am It's ''catalog maintenance', not 'cache maintenance'

Yes, my bad.

xnview wrote: Fri May 01, 2020 8:03 amyou have the warning dialog box before

Unfortunately the warning box dialog does not help me much. The dialog box that I receive says

Do you want to remove entries assigned to a category?
Be careful, entries with rating/label can be deleted

And then there are buttons saying "Yes", "No" and "Cancel"

The wording is really so bad that I don't understand what this wants to tell me, how this function works and what gets deleted or not when I click which button.
So I assume when I click "Yes", categories, ratings and color labels get deleted.
When I click "No" I assume that categories, ratings and color labels be kept (get not deleted).
When I click "Cancel" I assume that nothing gets changed.

And here is what happens when I click "No" I tested it multiple times:

Categories assigned to a file do not get deleted
If a file has only a color label or a rating assigned, then color label resp. rating gets deleted
But if a file has only a color label plus a rating assigned to it, it does not get deleted.

Thumbnails get deleted in any case.

I don't understand the sense behind this behavior.

As the catalog can hold the work of years cataloging files I don't think the current description/warning is clear enough. As someone has already said, losing thumbnails is not so hard as they can be rebuild but losing colors, ratings and categories by clicking the wrong option because of lack of information is very bad as they cannot be rebuild automatically.

So why not clearly state what will be deleted instead of what could be deleted which does not explain anything or better, to give the user a way to select what to be deleted and what to be kept.

A far better solution would be:
1. User clicks delete
2. A dialog pops up where user can select checkboxes what he wants to be deleted: thumbnails, categories, ratings, colors, tags
3. Perform deletion only of the assignments that the user has selected.