Disable virtual copies at all!

DxO PhotoLab Feature requests
41

@asvensson I don’t know if you have actually told us the details of what the Mac does?

Using the following mock up of what a user interface might look like, the current Windows version is the first box

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i.e. “Keep both” & “Use the database” (as the [M]aster).

This interface is for each occurrence of a UUID clash but with the additional option of 'Apply to all images" which gives a way of quickly resolving the situation for a whole selection/directory of images.

Setting the ‘Use the DOP’ option would keep both copies but put the database entry as the VC and the DOP entry as the [M]aster, selecting all VCs and deleting them should then be “relatively easy” task, providing DxPL isn’t mixing up the entries and the user is diligent enough to not to run past the last VC.

When user VCs are also included things start to get more complicated, DxPL should be able to handle the [M] becoming a VC and placing all entries from the DOP as [M], [1], …[N] and then entries from the database as [N+1], …[N + ?].

However life then gets complicated for the user in clearing out the detritus!

The ‘Use the timestamp’ option would help to handle the situation automatically iff the timestamps can be trusted and are being set appropriately!?

In the DOP there are the following timestamps for a single image with a basic edit

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It would appear that the ‘ModificationDate’ in the DOP might be a useful indicator of the date of the last edit but that needs to be verified by DxO or by more “boring” tests!

A similar screen could be added to an appropriate part of the ‘Preferences’ UI.

Something similar to ‘Apply to all images’ could be used to determine if the ‘Preferences’ selection will always be applied automatically, until changed in the ‘Preferences’, or whether the ‘Preferences’ value will be filled in on that screen when a UUID clash is detected and the user can amend or not on a case by case basis.

In the meantime @asvensson (or @platypus or @Joanna) which of the options shown is currently used for handling the situation on the Mac or have I missed an option or what?

Is DxO reluctant to make such changes or are they incapable of making such changes?

Their efforts with image handling for PL7 were lamentable and while I understand the need for headline grabbing editing capabilities for new releases there also needs to be continual upgrading of image housekeeping/husbandry in the product because it is sadly lacking.

42

The problem I have with this basic idea is that it is not possible to determine why I would choose one over the other.

To my mind, you really need to be able to either compare the list of edits from each one or, possibly see both images side by side.

Just being told that two copies/versions exist doesn’t give me enough information to choose.

43

@Joanna Then the alternative is what we have got right now on Windows, whatever you have on the Mac, and you still haven’t told me!

I agree that a list would be useful I was exploring options for an automatic process and trying to provoke a more productive discussion for DxO to ignore!

44

I fear they may be “incapable” as my son is always finding with programing he has to sort out. The people who originally produced it have long since gone and those who took over didn’t have the understanding of it to effectively maintain/update it. Sometimes he finds this is due to poor original programming some times that those taking over aren’t as capable Often then adding code has made everything worse as those managing and programing don’t understand what’s already there. The result is a mess and as with lightroom some years ago has to be totally re programed to get it properly working.

45

Simple, it doesn’t automatically create a virtual copy when it detects a dop that another instance of PL has written, it simply reads the dop an updates the image accordingly (when dop read is enabled in preferences).

On Windows, PL autonomously creates a virtual copy in this situation. Possibly PL has to be running when the update is made by another instance (I think you saw that; I regularly remove the database before starting PL to work around various issues, so I don’t really think about it anymore), and if so then I suppose you could call it user error, but I don’t necessarily want to exit PL every time I leave the computer, and sometimes I just end up on another computer without having planned my movements in detail in advance. Either way the automatic virtual copies on Windows are just a nuisance in my case.

Given my discussion with DxO, I think there’s zero chance of them implementing something like this. All I asked for was an on/off toggle for the current automatic creation of virtual copies (as poorly specified as it is), to allow those that prefer the Mac behaviour to configure it, but they weren’t open to that either.

Certainly the former, but the latter seems increasingly probable. :slight_smile:

They really just don’t seem to care much about the various inconsistencies between platforms and solving problems that their implementation choices create for users, cross-platform or not. They have DCP functionality that can’t be used cross-platform since it was introduced in PL2. They’ve introduced the same problem with LUT in PL7. They broke rotation of some images in PL5 with the new xmp functionality. They’ve effectively deprecated the Legacy colour space (since they’ve told me they’re only fixing outstanding issues in Wide Gamut), but don’t provide renderings that are equivalent to the Legacy ones. These (and more) are all issues I’ve discussed with them and not one have they been open to addressing; they just expect the user to suck it up and do whatever work is necessary to adapt to the most recent release.

I think it’s a great way to lose customers, at least those that don’t find any entertainment or value in continually adapting to changes in software. It’s the software that should be making migration painless for the user, but that’s clearly not the DxO way.
.

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46

I have never had a problem with unwanted virtual copies on my Mac but, maybe, I am not doing the wrong things that provoke it.

If you, or someone else can describe an “idiot guide” to getting it wrong on Windows, I can try to replicate it here. I have a USB-C external SSD with all my images on it and a USB-3 external physical disk with a clone made using SuperDuper. I also have another USB-C SSD, which is constantly being updated with a Time Machine backup of the system disk.

Not forgetting, because I use my own DAM and do not use persistent history, I regularly trash my database, relying solely on DOP files, which can be transferred to different locations, using Finder, without any problem.

47

I should add that I’m talking about the case I’ve experienced this in: different instances of PL viewing the same image archive. I’m not manually copying dops or changing disks or anything else. Just viewing and editing images on a common server.

48

@John7 That may well be true!

@Joanna Your wish is my command but now we need the logic the list screen to produce a useful list and then select appropriately and the task gets bigger and bigger!?

You still only enter one selection and ‘Apply to all images’, the alternative is you select ‘Show details’ and not apply all then receive the details of the two edits, but that is going to be a problem given that we can’t get DxO to put side by side copies of images under normal circumstances

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I have always considered DxO to be arrogant, with a large (massive) slice of “not invented here” syndrome but part way through PL7 testing it occurred to me that they were either incompetent or actually unable to make things work successfully.

The good news is that for my own purposes I use a subset of DxPL capabilities, albeit they trashed “indexing” which I wanted to use!

@Joanna I believe that these says if you are careful they are actually difficult to come by, i,e, DxPL is using the UUID whenever possible when it adds an image and edits to its database. Further edits on that platform should not change the UUID and it can be returned to the original system with the UUID intact and no “Unwanted VCs” will appear.

But if when it arrives on system 2 if that UUID is already in use then a new one will be allocated and hey presto you will get an “Unwanted item in the bagging area” when it returns to the first system

But the simplest way to see what they look like is

  1. make an edit and ensure you have a DOP
  2. Hack the DOP and change 1 digit of this field

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to

image
and you get

image

From what @asvensson has suggested that may or may not happen on the Mac.

Given the crudeness of this particular test you won’t be able to tell if it is the later edits because they are both the same but you might just get an “Unwanted VC” or not!

49

I was (until recently) a software developer for over 25 years and everything your son says is true. :slight_smile:

Often you do need to rework the code to understand it, but the worst thing you can do is not dare. That’s an excellent way of ensuring that existing issues are never addressed and new ones are added, and there are often product/project managers who don’t want to change anything for fear of breaking it. Not entirely irrational since everyone before you probably also had good intentions, but at some point it breaks down and you have to do something.

Could well be what’s happening at DxO, but who knows. What I do know it that the rate at which bug fixes come out of DxO is positively glacial. For example, the DCP issue is a conceptually simple fix (have a known path on the search path, only write filenames to dop, not absolute paths), and I can’t imagine that it would take a competent developer who’s familiar with the code more than a day to implement. It’s over 5 years now since the problem was introduced, and it should never have been introduced in the first place if they had even considered cross-platform compatibility when designing the feature.

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50

I also just use a subset, because DxO increasingly demonstrates that PL isn’t a tool that I can rely on over time. I use it as a raw editor to export raster files, but wouldn’t dream of putting metadata in it or using it as some sort of Lightroom replacement to manage/browse my entire image archive into the future, as the marketing suggests is something one might want to use PL for.

It’s disappointing since I really like the results I get out of PL and largely like its editing capabilities, but it is what it is. With the exception of noise reduction I don’t really see anything that I’m less happy with in Affinity Photo (I have to pixel peep to find differences; not meaningful), so at some point I may just save myself the frustration with PL. If Affinity Photo had better noise reduction I’d be gone already, and even now it’s a small fraction of my images in which it’s a practical issue. Just living with that limitation is a viable option since it’s not as if PL doesn’t have limitations of its own.

Not there yet, but I truly dislike software that expects me to adapt to it from release to release, by not treating backwards compatibility as a feature.

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51

I agree with everything you said, as I have already made a similar decision for myself.
For me it is important that I can rely on a software. And I know that there is no such thing as 100% software, but after all that I have read here in the last few weeks, the inconsistencies are piling up, they are not really working on a stable version with the corresponding bug fixes, and the absence of DXO employees does not leave a good impression either.

Since I don’t really need the admittedly great denoising, I work more and more with Topaz and Affinity.

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52

@asvensson and @Guenterm I am confused about your references to Affinity. I have owned a copy of Affinity since version 1 but it is an image editor like image editors of old and I never really got on with them!

My move to DxPL wasn’t a move to DxPL at all it was a move to DxOpticspro 11 because it allowed me to apply a preset to lots of images, review those images and refine that preset and create new ones as necessary and it didn’t “insist” I had to save the exports in a “stupid” default location as so much software did at that time!

I have just looked at my copy of Affinity 2 and I cannot find the equivalent of the thumbnail strip, I can find Batch processing but I do not consider that an alternative to DxPL in the least.

The features on offer may well be better than DxPL, it certainly has a number of features that can also be found in other software but not in DxPL but I cannot see that Affinity fits my desired workflow any better than a number of other products (except the price for unlimited copies, the bundled additional software and the quality of individual elements, if you can wrap your brain around them!

image

I didn’t buy DxPL (DxOp) to process one image at a time so where is the equivalent that makes Affinity 2 an alternative to DxPL (it may well be there and I would like you to show me where)?

That simply makes my frustration greater because I like DxPL a lot, for what I want to do, but it is flawed.

Worse no-one in DxO seems to be the slightest bit concerned about even selecting the “low hanging fruit” of the flaws (I have always hated that expression but it seems so appropriate here) and making any sort of progress to resolve the issues.

Indeed they seem to be creating even more flaws at every release, albeit allegedly fixing others, “allegedly” because they don’t seem to feel we can handle any level of detail in the release notes (or they are too embarrassed to share the “gory” details with us or they can’t remember what was fixed and what was not or they tested the fixes and they “mostly” seemed to work, “most” of the time or …)!?

I will continue to use DxPL because it does what I want it too but DxO are slowly destroying their credibility, actually “slowly” might not be the right word.

Signed

Bitter H And Y Twisted (BHAYT)

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53

It’s a non-destructive (since v2) raw editor that can export raster files, there are LUTs, presets, the licensing is problem-free, plus it’s a pixel editor with stacking, stitching, etc, etc. As a raw editor it’s as capable as PL.

The one thing it doesn’t have that many would like is any kind of built-in browser, but there are plenty of times I wish I could just open a single raw in PL without it insisting on digesting the entire directory in question. In that sense, AP is your image editor of old.

If a built-in browser is what you need in an editor then you’re not going to find it in AP, today at least. I just use Windows Explorer as my browser, or Finder on Mac, and both display the embedded thumbnail showing the result of my editing. But since there’s no equivalent of the PhotoLibrary tab there’s also no browsing/filtering/searching like you have in PL, and I think that’s what a lot of people (including me) would like to see in an Affinity app. The way it’s been going, I suspect I have a better chance of living to see this than I have of seeing fixes for all compatibility issues I’ve run into with PL. :slight_smile:

I like it as well, but I’m now into my seventh release of PL and DxO shows little interest in addressing all the issues they’ve created. Instead, like you say, they just seem to add more with every release. I’ll see how PL7 pans out, but I’m not willing to pay endlessly for the current headaches. At some point it’s better to cut your loses.

54

what is the problem w/ that I ? I can open just one raw in PL from FRV w/o PL digesting anything else

55

that is how they keep you engaged here :smiley:

56

Interesting. I just tried this on Windows and it does indeed open the image in Customize, and if I switch to PhotoLibrary then I still only see this one image, which makes up an external selection in a similarly named pane on the left side of the window. I can’t tell offhand if PL is digesting other images in the directory in question or not, but it certainly looks like opening just a single image.

Do the same thing on Mac (which is where I was the last time I tried) and you just end up in PhotoLibrary with the image in question selected: other images in the directory are displayed as well. Open With in either Explorer on Windows or Finder on Mac does the same.

So FRV is doing something smarter on Windows. I don’t see any mention of these external selections in the PL documentation, and I don’t see any sign of it existing on Mac. Possibly yet another Windows/Mac difference.

57

Hey @Joanna, did you see this? :stuck_out_tongue: …and hello, hope you are well (Had I said thanks for repeatedly mentioning FRV yet?) :slight_smile:

Perhaps the reason some of us like it is contained in those words

As to unwanted VCs, I’m glad that I can’t see myself in a situation where they would get created on my storage. Very happy VCs exist though.

Also funky how back when there was only destructive editing and you needed to save actual copies of a file for every single edit you wanted to keep, storage space was not as relatively cheap as it is now. But our image files themselves have become huge :open_mouth:

58

@asvensson My typical use of DxPL etc. involved using FastStone Image Viewer (FSIV) to view the image directory, select a single “typical” image and pass to DxPL.

FSIV cannot successfully pass more than 1 image to DxPL, the way it tries to pass multiple images only ever results in the last image finally being opened!

Other browsers like XnViewMP, Fast Raw Viewer etc, can manage hundreds in one pass and these create an ‘External Selection’ which is stored in ‘Projects’ structure and automatically opened in DxPL(Win) ‘Customize’.

These ‘External selection’ projects can be from 1 to hundreds of images in size, I once did some tests but they might have been limited by other factors. If the image is already in the database then only new ‘Projects’ pointers will be created, otherwise an entry for the image and the pointers will be created.

However having passed one image I would apply a preset, refine as necessary and copy the edit and then open the whole directory in DxPL and apply (paste) the edits.

Then look for issues and develop more edits etc. and I like that way of working in particular. One problem I encounter is to make individual adjustments that means I need to roll out that change to all the images.

That is where ‘Partial presets’ come into their own, i.e. I have applied a preset to all the images and then refined the edits for some images when I realise one of the original settings was not right!.

If I apply the original preset again all the individual adjustments will be lost so I use an existing ‘partial’ preset, and adjusted version of an existing Partial or develop a new one and add it to my library

I understand that but the use of DxPL fits my style of editing so I will continue to use it and pester DxO without getting any more irate than I currently am!

and others may not because I want my non-destructive editing to be controllable by Presets, on/off toggles and Partial presets so that I can analyse the effects of my editing choices by eye and perhaps make better choices.

Products that don’t allow that as easily as DxPL are of limited use to me unless they contain features that I would like to be available in DxPL, like an effective automatic colour correction, with or without the AI “branding”, when I will need to travel outside the product.

PS:- Here are 300 images being passed from XnViewMP to PL6.10, I managed a batch of 330 images

image

59

@BHAYT I don’t understand - why are you comparing a pixel editing and painting tool with a raw editor(Affinity Photo) with a raw photo developing tool (PhotoLab)? I also think price needs to be taken into consideration when comparing. My intention of quoting you was a pun by the way. Not intending to say one thing is better than another.

I also use Affinity Photo to fill in scanned forms to save as PDFs and other things I would never consider trying to use PhotoLab for. Which is one reason why I like it (Maybe you could fill in PDF forms with repeated use of watermarks)

@Kit 200k + raw files. Stacking, HDRIs, time-lapse… or top secret?

EDIT: @BHAYT for clarification, I am literally an old image editor who likes using old image edtors and you could say I have an affinty for it (I also occasionally use GIMP - though simply to be able to when I really need to)

60

In addition to the information from @asvensson, here are a few statements from me.

I have been using DXO since 2012 with the version DXO Optics Pro Standard 7.2 and over the years I have been through all the infamies up to version 5 :grin:

Unlike you, batch processing is not a big issue for me, as I mostly edit single images for our flat, or sometimes create a photo book. I work my way through image by image and that’s good.

From version 6 onwards, I was no longer completely satisfied with what was delivered as a major release paid version (lack of proper soft proofing, minor errors, still no improvement of the UI, etc.).
And from here on I also refused to update to a version that I had accompanied for months as an EA member, in which a lot of information from EA members had not been incorporated, and above all had not brought any further advantages for my photo editing hobby. And in the back of my mind I would always have had the feeling “…what’s badly implemented now…”.

I accompanied Affinty Photo in the first version as a beta tester, and for me APhoto and APublisher were meant as a replacement for the Adobe Cloud stuff. In the meantime I get along with AP quite well, even if I sometimes get caught up in the variety of functions :upside_down_face:
AP isn’t perfect either, but somehow I feel more appreciated as a customer here.

I also always thought that the DAM part in DXO would be implemented cleanly over time, but Joanna has already written a lot on this topic…but only minor changes.

In the end, I believe more that missing functions will be implemented in AP (Batch is also discussed there in the forum) than that DXO will finally implement all the FR’s with many votes. In the DAM area I continue to use LR 6.14 locally, and for quick culling FRV at the very beginning.

Others may have a more differentiated view, but that’s the good thing about discussing things honestly and constructively here.

Have a nice weekend

Guenter

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