ACDSee Ultimate 2021 - Constant Crashes

[michaelw]

I have Ultimate 2021 Version 14 Build 2457, which I believe is the latest version.
My PC specs are:

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9
RAM 32Gb
Motherboard: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG STRIX X570-E GAMING (AM4)
Graphics Card: SUS Radeon RX 5500 XT
Storage: Boot Disk 500GB M.2 NVME PCIE 4 Solid State Hard Drive (Sabrent Rocket)
Working Disk 2TB M.2 NVME PCIE 4 Solid State Hard Drive (Sabrent Rocket)

Plus I have other HDD that I use for back up. The 2Tb M.2 disk above is the one I use to store the images I am working on in ACDSee Ultimate 2021.
None of the HDDs have been excluded within ACDSee Ultimate 2021, or indeed any of the folders within them

The folder(s) that I have been working on have around 57Gb work of images a mixture of scanned images, .JPG. .TIFF and .acdc.

I have been gradually adding to these images as I scan new images.

Over the past few days ACDSee Ultimate 2021 has been crashing at random intervals, sometimes whilst I am editing, sometimes whilst in the manage mode.

Now it will not even start, when I click on the icon the initial splash screen comes up then disappear and nothing happens. Sometimes eventually ACDSee Ultimate 2021 will open, sometimes if I have clicked on the icon more than once multiple copies open. ACDSee Ultimate 2021 will then either close down immediately or will work for a while and with no warning will crash.

This is becoming very tedious, I have a large number of images that I want to scan and preserve for posterity, I quite like using ACDSee Ultimate 2021 but at present it is unusable.

I suspect it is something to do with the number and size of images but surely ACDSee Ultimate 2021 should be able to deal with this.

I cannot believe that the problem is with my PC specs, everything else seems to work, video editing programs etc etc.

So my questions are:

Is the problem likely to be ACDSee Ultimate 2021's inability to deal with large number of HDDs and files?
Is there a published limit as to how many images and what storage space ACDSee Ultimate 2021 can deal with?
If I cannot get ACDSee Ultimate 2021 to stay open long enough how can I exclude all but the folders I am working on?
If I exclude folders how can I include them again?
If I uninstall and install ACDSee Ultimate 2021 will I loose all of the actions, settings, etc etc that I have set up?

Or do I just need to give up with ACDSee Ultimate 2021 and go somewhere else? Any suggestions as to alternative software would be appreciated.

I will try and post this on the support web site to see if I get any response.


Regards (from a very frustrated)

Michael

[Len]

If you get the Splash screen and then nothing it often means that the Prog. is running in the background.
Go to Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and it should show as running, close it down and try again.
Often works.

[michaelw]

Len,
Thank you for your reply. I forgot to say in my original post that I had been to Task manger and it was running in fact sometimes multiple version were running. I would shut all instances down and try again but with the same results.

[Greyfox]

I have Ultimate 2021 Version 14 Build 2457, which I believe is the latest version.

Well mine says its build 2451 and that there are no updates available. Maybe the build number is different for different languages.

Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit

Might be helpful to indicate whether it is the 2004 build, or 1904 or earlier.

The folder(s) that I have been working on have around 57Gb work of images a mixture of scanned images

If you are only working with 57GB, then it shouldn't be the overall combined size of the images. I currently have over 100GB of images cataloged in Ultimate 2021 (5 drives, 2148 folders, 66,594 thumbnails) and I'd be fairly certain there are others with much larger collections.

Maybe a couple of suggestions.

1. Back up your current database, then open a new temporary database under a different name, and add only a few folders to it see whether the problem relates to the current catalog. That shouldn't adversely affect your present database.

2. Run Tools->Database->Optimise Database on your current database.

Edit: To add the following:

3. Check Settings->System->Display->Graphics Settings-Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling.
If it is On, then change it to Off and see whether that helps

4. If your Windows 10 version is 2004, then in the Windows 10 search bar, type in Color Management and open the Color Management dialog.
Select the Advanced Tab and check the Windows Color System Defaults->Device Profile.
Some other image editing software has experience start up problems if this is set to "scRBG virtual device model profile" or "sRBG virtual device model profile"
If it is either one of these set it to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 and see if that helps.

[Regor250]

Must be frustrating. Definitely not the size of your data. Mine is like 3/4 of aTerabyte, no crashes. I have up to date video drivers and relatively fresh install of windows 10 (a few months ago did a complete refresh).

[[email protected]]

Michael,

I have the exact same issue. Please checkout my related post here: https://forum.acdsee.com/forum/main-...-gdi32full-dll

[Framon]

Well mine says its build 2451 and that there are no updates available. Maybe the build number is different for different languages.

FYI, french version's build is also 2451.

[WolfgangB]

Hi,
the German Version is also Build 2451.

[michaelw]

Hi to All,
First of all the version number was a typo, my version is indeed 2451, blame my age, or perhaps I was looking forward to the version when all the issue are fixed!

So to go through some of the comments/ideas that the clever people on this forum have suggested and for which I am very grateful.

Greyfox:

Might be helpful to indicate whether it is the 2004 build, or 1904 or earlier.
I have Win 10 Version 2004 Build 19041.508
1. Back up your current database,.......
Have not had a chance to do this I will explain why after I have addressed all of the suggestions
2. Run Tools->Database->Optimise Database on your current database
Again Have not had a chance to do this I will explain why after I have addressed all of the suggestions
3 . Check Settings->System->Display->Graphics Settings-Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling
Not sure where this is is this a ACDSee setting or a windows setting ?
4. Windows Color System Defaults->Device Profile
It was set to set it to sRGB IEC61966-2.1

Sushant

When I clicked on the url you provided I got the message: Sorry, you are not authorized to view this page. For assistance contact the site administrator.

So after much digging around and with the realisation that this problem has been getting worse as I increased the number of images that I had I did the following:

1. I removed all of the external drives that were connected, I had some that were in Caddies plus some connected by USB so that all that was left was the internal discs.
2. Doing this allowed ACDSee to open and not crash immediately.
3. I then went through all of the internal and Network discs and right clicked on the disc within ACDSee and selected exclude from Database.
4. Even though in Tools/Database/Excluded Folders Setting the check box for Always Exclude Removable Drives was ticked ACDSee did not exclude them when I reconnected them
5. So now I was just left with my main data drive a 2Tb M.2 SSD as an included drive
6. I then shut ACDSee down.
7. When I clicked on the icon the software opened although there was still a perceptible delay where there appears to be no activity and all that is visible is the desktop but at least it opened.

So I have been using the program for the past day with just the 2Tb M.2 in use and although it has crashed occasionally it is nowhere near as flaky as it was.

I have to say though it is not as stable as it should be, I have been using Picasa for a number of years and I have had more problems with ACDSee (which I know has more facilities) in the few weeks I have been using it than I ever did in the years that I used the free software Picasa! Perhaps some will suggest that I stop whinging and go back to Picasa.

Now it might be that the database has been somehow corrupted in only the areas that deal with the discs that have been removed.

Where can I find the crash dump report if indeed such a thing exists?

I will get around to gradually adding discs back to see the result.

It does however seem to me that ACDSee became overwhelmed with the number of images. Some of the images I scanned were very large, I have copies of relative's service and war records that I want to preserve so I am scanning them at a high resolution and saving them initially as .tiffs I did nothing else but reduce the number of images that ACDSee has access to and it has started working again.

Greyfox the reason I have not yet tried your first two suggestions is that I wanted to see how long ACDSee remain stable with doing nothing than reduce the number of images

I think it would be much better to have all discs excluded and allow the user to add those that they need rather than assume that all discs should be included, opt out by default rather than opt in (exactly as Picasa does)

Also is there someway to auto save an images say every 30 secs. I do have autosave selected under edit mode/tools/options but that only saves if you move away from the image. So as has happened to me on a number of occasions you can be in the middle of working on something a crash occurs and you lose everything. I have lost confidence in ACDSee so am trying to remember to save as frequently as I can but inevitably the one time it crashes is the one time I have forgotten to save recently!

I will persevere for now with ACDSee in the hope that my experience will improve, but if ACDSee is really intended as a piece of Digital Assets Software then surely it should be able to cope with an infinite number of images or at least warn you when it is approaching a limit and not just crash?

Thanks for all of the suggestions and for taking the time to read the above.

Regards to all

Michael

[Greyfox]

michaelw

Just to add some information you might find useful

Settings->System->Display->Graphics Settings->Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling is a Windows 10 setting introduced in version 2004.
It is intended to offer some performance benefits where the Graphics card supports the new feature, but also does have some reported issues, hence my suggestion that if it was set to On, try turning it off.

Removable Drives - this can be a tad confusing.

On page 37 of the Ultimate 2021 manual, it says
"USB Removable device: removable devices include memory cards that you can attach to your computer using a USB card reader, camera memory cards that insert directly into slots on the computer, or flash drives. USB removable devices are detected by your computer and are shown in the structure as a removable drive".

No mention of external USB connected hard drives, and indeed in my experience ACDSee does NOT see external USB hard drives as removable drives, and the "Always exclude removable drives" setting DOESN'T apply to them.

I will also add that whilst it DOES apply to perhaps the majority of USB flash, there are exceptions - see more about this further on.

For the attached screen shots the "Always exclude removable drives" and "Always exclude CD/DVD drives" settings are both ticked.

The shot on the left shows a folder tree in ACDSee Ultimate 2021. You will see that the DVD RW Drive (E) as expected has the "crossed circle" marker indicating it is excluded from the database, as is also the case for USB A (M) which is a USB flash drive, and PORTABLEAPP (N), another USB flash drive.

Elements-2 (F) and SG-USB3-2TB (L) are both USB external hard drives and DO NOT have the "excluded from database" crossed circle marker.

GDS10-P2 (K) also doesn't have the "excluded from database" crossed circle, BUT it is in fact a Sandisk Cruzer Switch flash drive.

In the right hand side screen shot, taken from Tools->Database->Database Maintenance, you can see that only the flash drives USB A (M) and PORTABLEAPP (N) are being classed as removable. SG-USB3-2TB (L), Elements-2 (F) and GDS10-P2 (K) are all classed as local, along with the internal drives.

In mid 2013 Sandisk (and maybe some other manufacturers) changed production of their flash drives so they were configured as fixed disks to meet with a perceived Microsoft certification requirement. This practice was discontinued around the end of 2013. GDS10-P2 (K) is one of those "fixed disk" flash drives.

[Regor250]

michaelw

Just to add some information you might find useful

Settings->System->Display->Graphics Settings->Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling is a Windows 10 setting introduced in version 2004.
It is intended to offer some performance benefits where the Graphics card supports the new feature, but also does have some reported issues, hence my suggestion that if it was set to On, try turning it off.

Removable Drives - this can be a tad confusing.

On page 37 of the Ultimate 2021 manual, it says
"USB Removable device: removable devices include memory cards that you can attach to your computer using a USB card reader, camera memory cards that insert directly into slots on the computer, or flash drives. USB removable devices are detected by your computer and are shown in the structure as a removable drive".

No mention of external USB connected hard drives, and indeed in my experience ACDSee does NOT see external USB hard drives as removable drives, and the "Always exclude removable drives" setting DOESN'T apply to them.

I will also add that whilst it DOES apply to perhaps the majority of USB flash, there are exceptions - see more about this further on.

For the attached screen shots the "Always exclude removable drives" and "Always exclude CD/DVD drives" settings are both ticked.

The shot on the left shows a folder tree in ACDSee Ultimate 2021. You will see that the DVD RW Drive (E) as expected has the "crossed circle" marker indicating it is excluded from the database, as is also the case for USB A (M) which is a USB flash drive, and PORTABLEAPP (N), another USB flash drive.

Elements-2 (F) and SG-USB3-2TB (L) are both USB external hard drives and DO NOT have the "excluded from database" crossed circle marker.

GDS10-P2 (K) also doesn't have the "excluded from database" crossed circle, BUT it is in fact a Sandisk Cruzer Switch flash drive.

In the right hand side screen shot, taken from Tools->Database->Database Maintenance, you can see that only the flash drives USB A (M) and PORTABLEAPP (N) are being classed as removable. SG-USB3-2TB (L), Elements-2 (F) and GDS10-P2 (K) are all classed as local, along with the internal drives.

In mid 2013 Sandisk (and maybe some other manufacturers) changed production of their flash drives so they were configured as fixed disks to meet with a perceived Microsoft certification requirement. This practice was discontinued around the end of 2013. GDS10-P2 (K) is one of those "fixed disk" flash drives.

My entire photo collection is on an external USB Hard Drive; this has not been an issue. One thing I did though is to reassign the drive to Z: as a precaution so it will never get assigned a different letter to maintain database integrity. This way I can have many other USB drives and not worry about the order they are connected to the computer.

[TomV]

Just as a point of reference, I have over a Terabyte of files. I have a RAID 1 system connected to the motherboard, 2 identical 8 TB drives seen as 1 drive by Win10. To eliminate very slow performance by my mouse I disabled Face Recognition. I have not encountered any crashes or freezing with the latest Ultimate. I even have a GPU on my CPU (AMD Kaveri 3.7 Ghz processor).

[michaelw]

Greyfox,
Thank you very much for the very detailed explanation you provided, very informative.

So a quick update:

Having looked for Settings->System->Display->Graphics Settings->Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling it is not present under the Graphics settings tab, not sure if this is because it is not compatible with my graphics card (ASUS Radeon RX 5500 XT) but in any event I assume that as it is not available to select it is not turned on?

I am still working with all but the 2Tb M.2 excluded and so far there have been no crashes. I am working on some scanned in files that were scanned as .tiff and then converted and edited as .acdc files that are around 500Mb each in size. Whilst working on these can cause slower reactions in terms of saving etc compared to smaller files the time is more than acceptable and does not cause an issue.

I assumed that excluding the drives and folders removes the data etc pertaining to the images on this locations from the database. I have optimized the database and I exported the database as a text file and although quite difficult to interpret it appears that only folders that are on the "included" drive are shown. Looking at database maintenance although the excluded drives are shown they have not been updated to reflect any changes I have made in terms of Folder Names etc. So it looks like everything is frozen at the time that I excluded rather than deleted. Am I correct in this interpretation?

I will gradually add drives back in and see what happens. Many of the drives that I had connected contained back ups and much older files perhaps the fact that the default setting of ACDSee including all of the drives and therefore lots of duplicates perhaps caused my problem. I assume that users do exclude locations that hold backups. Although based on the many users that seem to have large numbers of images perhaps that is not an issue?

Purely based on my experience since excluding drives/Folders I am forced to the conclusion, perhaps erroneous, that the problem was caused by the number of images and perhaps by the duplicates purely based on the fact that since excluding and doing nothing else the problems have all but disappeared.

Interested in any thoughts and again thank to all for your assistance.

Regards

Michael

[Greyfox]

....I assumed that excluding the drives and folders removes the data etc pertaining to the images on this locations from the database. I have optimized the database and I exported the database as a text file and although quite difficult to interpret it appears that only folders that are on the "included" drive are shown. Looking at database maintenance although the excluded drives are shown they have not been updated to reflect any changes I have made in terms of Folder Names etc. So it looks like everything is frozen at the time that I excluded rather than deleted. Am I correct in this interpretation?

I placed a new folder with 4 images in it on one of the local SSD drives not normally used for images. To each of these images I added some ACDSee metadata (keywords and Titles), and then made sure I could find those images from both the keywords and from quick search. I then excluded that drive (Tools->Options->Database->Excluded Folders->Add).
When I did the following warning was given indicating that any information stored would be lost.


After restarting ACDSee I was no longer able to find the images either by keyword or quick search, though of course they were still in the folder, and in Tools->Database->Database Maintenance that folder shows as not having either thumbnails or Orphans.

[Roman Matejov Fotografie]

Downgrade to 2020 or to 2019. Sorry for this Hint but I have not any Understanding to 2021-Version:
I was testing it, I can´t work with it. Too slow, too unstable. Or maybe our RAYZN 9 Processors are not strong enough ???? ...