Move files and avoid rescanning for faces

[pschweig]

Hi

I have downloaded tons of photos from my iPhone via Mobile Sync and I now want to move them to a new folder. Is there any way to move the files to a new folder without ACDSee thinking it needs to rescan for faces? Would be good to avoid that long running job.

thanks
Paul

[Greyfox]

Hi

I have downloaded tons of photos from my iPhone via Mobile Sync and I now want to move them to a new folder. Is there any way to move the files to a new folder without ACDSee thinking it needs to rescan for faces? Would be good to avoid that long running job.

Is this a case where you don't want those images scanned for face recognition at all, or have they already been scanned in the "Mobile Sync" folder.

The explanation here from Tristan H, https://forum.acdsee.com/forum/main/...8010#post58010 might be of assistance.

[Tristan H]

Hi Paul,

If the photos have already had faces detected, simply moving those photos to another folder within ACDSee will also adjust all their database records, including face data. So the existing face data will be preserved as long as you use ACDSee to move the photos (as opposed to using File Explorer).

If you're concerned about the face data, you can embed it into the photos before moving them. This will keep a copy of the face data within the photos themselves, which you can re-import if anything goes wrong with the data stored in the database. More information on embedding here: https://help.acdsystems.com/en/acdse...H_DB_ABOUT.htm

Thanks,
Tristan H.
ACD Systems

[pschweig]

thanks for the answers

[zero_koop]

WARNING: do not embed the face data if you are working off of a networked drive. I did this and nearly lost all of my personal photos if it weren't for my online backup plan.

[Tristan H]

Hi zero_koop,

I am sorry to hear that you had an issue like this. But as far as I know, embedding ACDSee Metadata or Face Data should work normally on network drives. It certainly should not lead to data loss.

Could you please give some more details about what happened? What kind of network drive were you using? When you tried to embed the metadata, what happened to the files?

Thanks,
Tristan H.
ACD Systems

[zero_koop]

Hi zero_koop,

I am sorry to hear that you had an issue like this. But as far as I know, embedding ACDSee Metadata or Face Data should work normally on network drives. It certainly should not lead to data loss.

Could you please give some more details about what happened? What kind of network drive were you using? When you tried to embed the metadata, what happened to the files?

Thanks,
Tristan H.
ACD Systems

Sure, sorry I don't mean to hijack this thread but I thought it was an important warning. First, I'll be honest that I cannot be 100% sure it was the fault of the metadata embedding but I am 95% sure (no exaggeration) based on the evidence. My networked drives come from my UnRAID server (https://unraid.net/). UnRAID provides redundancy in case a drive fails, but it does not have a "recycle bin" for deleted files. Files that are purposefully (or accidentally) deleted are permanently deleted.

I had been tagging faces for a while before I noticed the embed feature. When tagging faces you can usually get like 50% of the way done very quickly relying mostly on the algorithm to pick the right names for the faces. So I decided to go ahead and commit those faces to the files before working on the rest. When I executed the command I left it overnight because it looked like it was going to take a long time. When I came back the next morning I don't remember the exact error but there was some sort of message from ACDSee. I think it was saying some file updates didn't take or maybe it even said some files were missing. I dismissed it thinking "oh well, I guess my computer went to sleep or something in the middle of the process". Then I continued working on face tagging for about a month until just over a week ago. On that day I was viewing some files (not just thumbnails) and I kept getting ACDSee warnings saying the files were not found. This warning isn't totally unusual for me as I move files around and sometimes I'll make copies for a project then delete the copies. But I kept getting the message and decided to look into and to my horror about half (probably more) of my photos were GONE from the server. My server is backed up online using CrashPlan and sure enough, I found those files in the DELETED folder on CrashPlan's backup server (meaning that CrashPlan detected that they were deleted on my end). The date of deletion was the date I committed those changes to embed the face data. Doing some random sampling I discovered that not every picture was deleted from every folder. Guess which pictures remained on the server: the pictures without faces in them. I hadn't tagged every face yet so some photos with faces remained on my server, but every photo that I sampled that was deleted did indeed include a face.

And I was very lucky, because had I continued to only view photo thumbnails (as you do with the face tagging exercise) I would have never received the "file not found" error. In a matter of days even CrashPlan was going to delete those pictures from their server! I almost lost all of my photos of my kids forever. I cannot be 100% sure that I didn't lose some pictures in this tragedy, but I don't think that I did. Obviously, this revealed a gap in my backup plan and so I am currently burning all my precious photos and videos to BluRay M-Discs for permanent offline backup.

When I first setup ACDSee I thought I remembered seeing a warning saying not to use networked drives. Am I wrong? After this incident I tried to find that warning in the ACDSee help documentation but couldn't find it, so based on your comment maybe I am wrong. Still, I won't be doing that again.

[Greyfox]

zero_koop

If I was in your situation, I would carry out a simple controlled test.

1. Put three images of each format you use (for example, RAW, JPG, TIFF) in a new "test" folder on your network storage. All images should contain faces.
2. For one of each type of image, assign all of the ACDSee metadata (excluding Face ID), so keywords, captions, ratings, Author, Notes, Categories etc.
3. For one of each type of image, assign the same ACDSee metadata as in 2. and also assign Face ID's
4. For one of each type of image, assign Face ID's only.

5. Select all of the images and do a Tools/Metadata/Embed ACDSee metadata. With the small number of images, that should be quick.

Make a note of any error messages if there are any. If you don't have a screen grab utility to copy any error dialogs, then take a shot of the screen with your camera.

Now you can make the following quick checks.

6. Were any of the images deleted. There shouldn't have been, but if that did occur
a/ is there any connection to image type (RAW, JPG, TIFF)
b/ is there any connection to which type of metadata (ACDSee without Face ID, ACDSee with Face ID or Face ID only.

7. This will also give you the chance to examine the images to confirm that each of the individual metadata types are actually being embedded properly.

Worst case scenario, you will have some concrete facts to provide to ACDSee Support.