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[MusicHawk]

UPDATE: Much better as of 23.0.41, but not quite...

I'm tagging many photos, often just one or two at a time, for a big scan-and-organize-family-photos project. When tagging photos, MC frequently crashes, first becoming unresponsive when looking up tags, then hangs, then closes itself or Windows does it. No other symptoms, no obvious pattern. (No problem using the same MC to tag music/audio files.)

Typically, I have a photo selected, then type a Caption, then often retype the Date (changing the scanned date to the actual photo date), then select (and/or add) one or a few Keywords. That's when it crashes. Usually I realize MC is about to crash when I can select the first keyword, but then it can't find the second keyword that already exists in the database. I know what's coming, just wait, MC crashes.

Even when MC does not crash (or, not yet), when tagging photos it eventually it loses the ability to search for existing values in the Keywords field. No matter what I type, nothing is found. I can create a new Keyword value, but the automatic search stops working. That is probably the biggest clue to what is broken, because it seems to be internal to MC, not related to the image files. However, I don't seem to encounter this Keywords lookup failure when working on music/audio files.

At this point, if I close MC then restart it, it resumes working properly (for a while). If I ignore the situation, perhaps because I'm not changing Keywords, but perhaps typing in dates or something, eventually MC will crash.

I don't know if the problem would happen with other fields, because for images Keywords is the only field I use that has many, many existing values, therefore automatic search happens, useful because almost all needed Keyword values already exist (almost 60 thousand image files). 

The problem occurs on average every 20 minutes of continual work on photos in MC. I restart and all is well....until it happens again. I go back to the same photo and it tags smoothly, so I don't suspect file issues. I'm used to the instability, it's not ruining my day, but it annoying and a bit time-wasting.

This issue seems limited to tagging JPG files, since the same MC works reliably with my music files. I've been organizing and tagging image files with MC for many years, many versions, and don't recall this instability except in recent months, so perhaps an anomaly has crept in?

PC is Windows 10, very stable, 12GB RAM.

[marko]

My current, long term, project is getting my music genre tags into some kind of order. I'm using the default Genre field and a custom, list type field called Sub Genre.
I do the tagging using the tagging check boxes in the two panes.

In the past few months, I've seen a similar issue, and, like you, I know the crash is coming, but there's no rhyme nor reason to it. I can't make it happen at will, and once it's up and running again, it has no problems with the files it crashed around previously.

The regularity that you're experiencing this with your pictures does not sound pleasant though. My guess is that there's a glitch in the new tag window when working with list type fields, but narrowing it down further is proving to be rather difficult...

For now, I thought it might help to know that at least you're not alone

[MusicHawk]

Marko, thanks for confirmation that there's a tagging problem.

I wonder why the image tagging crashes don't happen (very often) when tagging music files, but I'm not doing any mass music tagging recently, so maybe my audio file tagging is just lucky (I get crashes, more rarely).

Also worth mentioning is that my Keywords list is very very long, since I use it for !People\name, !Places\name, !Routes\name, !Events\name, and a bunch more. I don't use Panes because there are too many Keywords values (every important person, place, event, etc is in the list, spanning almost 60,000 photos). And, MC's view system is forced to parse all the values into virtual subfolders.

I don't know how the automatic Tag Search works internally, but perhaps slogging through a long long set of values is where the bug hides. If work was done on this a few months ago to implement the New Tag window is suspect, that's a big clue.

The 60,000 files probably average 5 Keywords (some have 2, some have 15). Of course, many of the Keywords are the same across multiple photos, but is the New Tag Window intended to work with so many Keyword values? Of concern because I'm 20% into scanning a mass of family photos (starting with dinosaurs, ending with today's eclipse) so my Image library will likely double.

[Matt]

It'd be really helpful if you could post a log after a crash.  We haven't reproduced any problems, but a log might help us track it down.  Thanks.

[MusicHawk]

Matt, I just emailed yesterday's log file to you.

(Didn't post the log because being family photos, there's private info in the log arising from file names and tags.)

[MusicHawk]

The crashing problem was real, Matt found a cause of it in my log/dump files, and now it is much improved in MC 23.0.41.