I do most of my editing on an M4 Mac Mini with only 16 GB of memory. With PhotoLab 9 that is adequate but the swap file definitely starts growing if I am editing or writing a lot of JPEG files. I have a miniPC running Windows 11 that has 32 GB of RAM and uses an AMD iGPU, it is definitely slower than the Mac but it seems to work.
This morning I tried to review the edits of one image on the PC and PhotoLab crashed while trying to process the file. I got a popup “The program is not responding” and then filled out some additional information. If I load the program again it once again tries to process that same file before crashing .
Since I appear to deadlocked on this file, is there any way to make PhotoLab forget the last file it was processing so I can try something else? In the meantime, I suppose I should just go back to using my Mac.
Is this an image that already has a .dop sidecar which you brought over from your Mac? The .dop sidecars created on a Mac are not 100% compatible with Windows, so if this is what you did, that’s likely why it keeps hanging the application.
I would recommend you try removing the .dop file for that image, using Windows Explorer (you can just move it over to your desktop, or similar, if you feel that you need to keep it) and try opening PL after that.
If that doesn’t work, you can delete the database which should make PL “forget” which image it was viewing.
Just be aware that this can have unwanted side effects. Your projects will all be lost, for example. I believe also all the advanced history items will be lost as well. There may be other effects, but as long as you have your DOP files for your images, your edits won’t be lost.
Removing the .dop file has no effect on the problem. I removed the database on the Windows system and that did solve the problem. I made some different local adjustments and the closed the Windows version.
I opened the Mac version again and it found my original local adjustments, confirming that the changes are stored in the database. Doesn’t this reliance on the database make it difficult to collaborate on files? Are we expected to have identical database files too? Nothing I really need to worry about but it is interesting to me that .dop does not fully describe the state of all modifications to a file.
I don’t think DxO claims that one can collaborate on photos between platforms, do they?
To my knowledge the .dop file does describe the state of all modifications, except for the entire history. The problem is that there are paths to required files inside the .dops that doesn’t translate between the platforms, and probably other idiosyncrasies specific to each platform as well.
I agree, though. The method of using sidecars should make this interoperability possible.
All the information for the photo’s edits is technically available in the .dop file and there’s no reason that a programmer couldn’t make them function on both platforms relatively easily.
That would be because the database entry for an image takes precedence over the sidecar/.dop file … So, removing the .dop file would make no difference if a database entry also existed.
At the very least the program should be intelligent enough to recognize an incompatible .dop file and ignore it. Having the program just crash is ridiculous.
Before PL9 they documented that dop was compatible across platforms, and that was largely the case. The one exception was that profiles (ICC/DCP/LUT) were written to dop as absolute paths, which isn’t even portable across computers necessarily. Other issues with compatibility that I’ve run across (which haven’t been many really) have been fixed as bugs.
I started pointing this out in PL4 at least. DxO then repeated the mistake with LUT files in PL7. As I’ve told them many times, all they need to do to at least make it possible to work across platforms/computers without modifying dop is to add a known directory on each platform for PL to look for profiles in (as is the case with presets and more) and write filenames instead of absolute paths for files in these directories. Even better, let the user configure a search path, which is more appropriate for files that the user supplies. Even better, add some error handling that doesn’t exist today, documentation, etc, etc. None of this has materialized since PL1.
Instead, they’ve now changed the documentation and added a FAQ that completely misrepresents the current reality. The result is that we no longer know if the current reality will change since DxO is giving up entirely on compatibility, if it’s just a lazy way for them to avoid promising/fixing anything, or if it’s just poor documentation. I’ve gotten mixed messages from Support when I’ve asked.
Either way, it’s hardly a good feature to not have a robust/reliable method of moving edits between computers, or for users to communicate edits with other users.
