Ashampoo Photo Organizer
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Changelog
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Feedback
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Hi,
Thank you for reaching out.
You're absolutely right—adding a clickable file name below the progress bar would be a great improvement. This way, you can easily check the details.
Did you enable error logging? If so, please share your Support ID, which you can find on the "About" screen. This will allow me to review the error report from your installation, which might provide clues about what’s going wrong.
Please note that background thumbnail creation pauses briefly if you scroll through your gallery. This happens because the system prioritizes loading thumbnails for the currently displayed images. In some cases, this delay could last up to a minute.
Kind regards,
Stefan
Stephan, I shut the machine down and restarted it without any other program running and shut down most auto-starting apps as well, then opened your app. This has now run through to Creating thumbnail 3037 / 32371. Please find a snapshot of the information I can offer you is attached: there is no option that I can see to enable the error report system. There is an option on Settings that enable error reporting which is on. Hopefully, it's done something under the bonet to capture the information, but it's not obvious how to send to you.
Stephan, for your information, your app is using around 75% of processor power and it is still reading the disk that holds the data steadily as you can see. It looks like it's stuck in a loop for some reson.
Hi,
Thank you for the information you provided.
To answer your question: If error reporting is enabled in the settings, the app will send error reports. The Support ID shown on the "About" screen is primarily used for associating error reports with specific users when needed. While analytics and error reports are sent anonymously using randomly generated identifiers for privacy reasons, there are instances where we might need to link reports to a particular user for troubleshooting.
We’ll include a note next to the Support ID to clarify its purpose when error reporting is enabled.
Regarding the issue you're encountering, it seems that no error reports have been generated under your Support ID. From the screenshot, it appears the app is using a significant amount of memory, which might be causing memory-related issues and potentially leading to a loop.
I’ll look into ways to further optimize memory usage, implement additional safeguards to prevent excessive usage, and enhance the detail captured in error reports.
I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. Rest assured, we’re committed to identifying the root cause of the issue and resolving it.
Kind regards,
Stefan
Stephan, I for one am not concerned about the program using a fair bit of memory during the building of its internal reference data if it speeds the process up - I like many other people have 16GB that never gets stretched.
Thought for you: in a supervising thread run a check against the building of master index or whatever you call it to ensure that it is processing and if it takes more than a nominated time, say 30 seconds then it sets an error flag and notes what's happening. If the same image is being processed after a minute give the user an error and stop the loop. Consider if it could clear the buffer and restart the indexing from where it left off as it would save a lot of time.
In the dim and distant past, I used to do some software quality assurance and have been involved in alpha and beta testing on many occasions. It's nice to see the program lead getting stuck into problem solving, a very nice change over many companies where the customer only gets to communicate with a call centre person who leaves you wondering if they are going to ask you "Would you like fries with that?"
Quick side question if I may; would having a reasonable graphics card speed up your app? I have a twelve core AMD processor but only a low-end graphics card at present.
Thank you for actively work on the problem.
Andy
Hi Andy,
Thank you for reaching out and for your efforts as a QA expert testing our app - it’s great to have you on board! 😊
I really like your suggestion about implementing a supervising/watchdog thread. It seems like a promising approach to prevent the app from getting stuck, and it’s definitely something we should explore further.
Regarding high memory usage, one of the challenges is that the Java Virtual Machine might terminate threads due to out-of-memory errors, leading to various issues. While there are some existing checks to mitigate excessive memory usage, they might not be sufficient. I'll look into enhancing both the supervisory mechanisms and memory management for the sync process.
As for communication channels, it depends on how you reach out. We have regular customer support for general inquiries, but I prefer direct engagement with users in the feedback forum. I truly appreciate that you value that. :)
On the topic of performance, using a better graphics card will indeed improve the app’s rendering performance overall. However, with the latest update, we’ve switched thumbnail generation to libvips, which is primarily CPU-bound. This means sync performance might remain unaffected, but the app should feel smoother and more responsive overall.
By default, we use integrated graphics, as it’s standard for photo management apps. Using the GPU would increase power consumption on notebooks or activate the fans on a dedicated graphics card, which we aim to avoid. That said, we understand some users prefer to use their GPU power, so we’ve included a configuration option for this:
You can adjust the GPU priority in the settings file located here:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Ashampoo Photo Organizer Pro 25\photos.ini
Thank you once again for your valuable input!
Kind regards,
Stefan
Hi,
Version 25.50.81 has just been released.
Could you please verify if it resolves the issue with stalling during thumbnail generation?
We watch the process and cancel it when it takes to long like you suggested. Thank you again for your help! :)
Kind regards,
Stefan
Hi Stefan,
I have updated to the latest version and at 43% of creating thumbnails it stalls with Task Manager showing:
Watching the percent of processor in use on each line, about of half of them showing values that change the odd decimal number every few seconds.
Task Manager lists about the same number of Console Window Hosts, none of which are taking any processing power and only occasionally changing memory usage by a very small amount.
I have been leaving it run for over 10 minutes and there’s no indication of the long-stop timer doing anything, its still at 43% and using 100% processor. The top vipsthumbnail is has started showing suspended for a few seconds before the suspension appearing to stop.
Just noticed you little up arrow on the percentage bar, opened it and it displays:
Watching the percentage line, the 611 has increased to 813 over around 2 minutes. It is ticking up but very slowly which might be keeping your timer happy since it seems to be working but gone from being quite quick to painfully slow. (It takes me back to my old 386 machine before I added the maths co-processors, the 387.)
Sorry to be bearer of bad news.
Regards,
Andy Croft
Stefan,
The first 500 or so thumbnails were produced very quickly in a few seconds but where I had thought it was stalled, it has slowed down to around 3 seconds per image! It has now crept up to 20456 since I took the screenshot above.
Regards,
Andy
Hi Andy,
Thank you for your test and feedback.
That’s certainly unusual. All vipsthumbnail.exe instances should terminate automatically if idle for more than 15 seconds.
I don’t have an explanation for this behavior at the moment, but I’ll investigate further to pinpoint where the process killer might be failing.
Would it be okay if I reach out to you with a development build for testing (by the time I have one)? This could help expedite the process, as our QA typically take a few days to look at my builds.
Looking forward to your thoughts.
Kind regards,
Stefan
Hi Stefan,
Happy to beta test for you, its something I've done before now.
It's still running and is now up to 21030 / 22261 creating the thumbnails. I'll leave it runing to see if it compleasts the the whole setup if left in peace.
Regards,
Andy
Hi Andy,
Thank you so much - I really appreciate it! 👍
As we approach the holidays, the team and I will be on vacation, but addressing this annoying bug remains our top priority.
I hope the thumbnailing process completes eventually so you can fully explore the app and share more of your valuable insights.
I’ll reach out again in January, but in the meantime, I wish you a wonderful holiday season!
All the best,
Stefan
Stefan,
A couple of hours after the message above, I shut down Outlook® 2021 MSO (Version 2411 Build 16.0.18227.20082) 64-bit, and the current version of Edge (Version 131.0.2903.99 (Official build) (64-bit)), as I was going to leave the machine on overnight, at which point making the thumbnails increased noticeably.
It did complete at some point over night I'm pleased to report although the monitor box at the bottom right closed itself on completion so I can't give the stats for the work done.
Happy holidays for the team and don't worry about this sort of thing whilst your off, concentrate on the really important things, the family. :-)
Andy
Hi Andy,
Thank you for letting me know. :)
I’ll forward your message to the team and reach out to you next year.
Best regards,
Stefan
Hi Stefan,
It's now around 24 hours since I kicked the program off and whilst it's not telling me what it's doing, according to Task Manager it's still pulling 100% of processor resources with lots of copies of vipsthumbnail eating around a varying amount of around 4% for each instance. Memory it is using around 4GB.
Looking at the Duplicates tab, there is an information box stating, "The photo processing is not yet complete, which may cause the results of this feature to be affected or incomplete." Might this be the reason that it's still hogging resources? It is still working, is it okay for me to close the app some that I can do other work or will it go back to square one next time I open it? No mention either in Help or in the user manual that I can see. Useability 101, is tell the user what's happening and indicate that it's working.
When I click on something and times just watching the system, there is an intermittent box popping up about "High memory usage! Cleaning up", which sort of confirms that the program is doing something, just not letting the user in on the secret.
The app spent a fair bit of time going through the photos doing face recognition: why? There does not appear to be anything done with the information or am I missing something?
I just closed the app so that I could do some other work but I still had Task Manager open. This indicated at a lot of the windows and processes associated with the app stopped and flushed as I'd expect, but it still has lots of vipsthumbnail running using 100% of processor! Unless a program tells me that it'll continue running in the tray, I expect it to shut down completely and return all resources. This program did neither, there is no obvious thing to tell the user it's running and provide the means to shut it down completely. Is it safe for me to kill the individual processes in Task Manger? Who knows? Should I reboot to stop it and is that safe? Not forgetting that the majority of users wouldn't even know what Task Manager is much less how to use it.
I could see the above creating some lovely reviews telling people to avoid the app since it doesn't let go of resources.
As a side thought, being able to look at an image and be able to use the one-click tools like the ones in Photo Commander (or other nominated tool(s),) to clean up an image whilst you're looking at it would be helpful. Save having to note which one it is and go around the loop to get to it. Be a much more streamlined usage.
Another thought would be to add to rename the option of putting your suggested name as a prefix to anything people already have for the photo. I've renamed most of my photos with subject name that's worth keeping but it would be helpful to have the prefix as nominated.
Happy Holidays,
Andy
Hi Andy,
Thank you for your detailed feedback! I appreciate the time you took to share your observations.
No, that’s just a warning indicating that all photos have had their pHash calculated, and the results are therefore incomplete. We've had users cancel the sync process before the grouping phase (pHash calculation) and then contact support, confused by the lack of results. The message is meant to alert users with incomplete syncs to expect missing duplicates.
I completely agree, and that’s why the app displays the synchronization overlay while it works. The user cannot hide this display.
In your specific case, it seems the app lost control over the external process, which is unfortunate.
My ultimate goal is to eliminate reliance on external executables and instead use VIPS DLLs via vips-ffm. However, this requires Java 22, and due to a bug on Oracles part, EXE files produced by Java 22’s jpackage can’t currently be signed with Microsoft’s signtool.
I didn’t anticipate external processes causing this much trouble. In hindsight, I might have waited, but user feedback about slow synchronization - paired with the significant speedup (4x) VIPS provides over SKIA for thumbnailing - was too compelling to ignore. Since it worked smoothly with my 18k photos during testing, I moved forward. I regret that decision now.
Face recognition is indeed resource-intensive because it involves locally executed machine learning. We plan to introduce a feature for tagging faces with names next year.
Currently, the app uses face data for focus assessment. Knowing where faces are allows us to crop them out for feeding into a quality-scoring algorithm.
This message means the app is out of memory. You can check memory usage in the "About" menu. It’s likely that VIPS consumed too much memory, causing the app to struggle.
That confirms the app completely lost control of the processes. This is a serious issue and has the highest priority for resolution.
If needed, it is safe to manually terminate these processes in Task Manager or reboot the system. Doing so should not cause any damage to your files or the app itself.
I completely agree with this expectation. The app isn’t designed to run in the tray. The external processes, for some reason, fail to terminate properly, which is likely a bug in the VIPS executable.
You’re absolutely right, and such feedback would be fair. We clearly made a misstep by rushing the integration of a new core technology without thoroughly testing it to the level of the old approach. I’ll admit I panicked a bit in response to user complaints about sync speed, even though I personally found it acceptable compared to similar tools.
We’re committed to resolving these issues as quickly as possible, and your feedback helps us prioritize what matters most.
Thank you also for your additional suggestions - they’re incredibly helpful!
Kind regards and happy holidays,
Stefan
I forgot to mention: You can disable VIPS by simply deleting or renaming the vipsthumbnail.exe file in the installation directory.
If the file is missing or cannot be loaded, the system will automatically fall back to the old algorithm.
You might want to test whether this causes the same issues and evaluate how acceptable the thumbnailing speed is with the fallback.
Hi Andy,
Even though I’m on vacation, I couldn’t resist looking into this issue - I was too curious to let it wait.
On a test set of 5000 Unsplash photos, the app behaves as expected. During thumbnail creation (either on-demand by scrolling through the library or via the synchronization process), vipsthumbnail.exe processes are spawned and terminated correctly. I couldn’t find any errors in this behavior.
However, I did notice an issue when exiting the application while a vipsthumbnail.exe process is still running: it becomes a zombie process. It continues to use CPU but doesn’t perform any real work.
This happens because external processes started by a JVM are not child processes but independent ones. Like you, I initially believed they would behave as child processes and terminate automatically, but that’s not the case. I wasn’t aware of this nuance, likely because I rarely use this technique - perhaps for good reason. Calling native DLLs remains a far superior approach.
To address this, I’ve implemented a fix that tracks all spawned processes in an internal list and ensures they are terminated when the user closes the app. This should prevent zombie processes from being created in normal operation.
However, if a user kills the app via Task Manager, any vipsthumbnail.exe instances will still become zombies. Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to handle this scenario, other than hoping for a resolution to JDK-8326447 in the near future.
I’ll send you a link to the beta EXE once the build server completes the process in a few hours.
I assume users encountering low-memory issues might also be affected by these zombie processes. I wish I’d been more aware of how easily they can be created unintentionally.
Thank you again for pointing out the importance of closely monitoring these processes in Task Manager - it was invaluable.
Best regards,
Stefan
Hi Andy,
I was about to send you a beta EXE with improved process handling, but after switching to a new test set of photos, I encountered an issue with zombie vipsthumbnail.exe instances.
Despite trying several approaches to manage them, it seems that calling an EXE in this way isn’t consistently reliable. Unfortunately, I’ll need to remove VIPS from the installation in the next update.
I plan to reintroduce VIPS once I can integrate it as a DLL and confirm that this issue is resolved with the new test set.
In the meantime, you can manually delete vipsthumbnail.exe from your installation.
Kind regards,
Stefan
@ajcpunit
Hi Andy,
I’ve just released a new side project that might be helpful here: the Thumbnail Fixer.
This utility enhances and repairs embedded thumbnails in JPG, PNG, and WebP files, optimizing their display speed in many applications, including this one.
Ashampoo Photo Organizer skips its own (currently less efficient) thumbnailing process for images that already include a sufficient embedded thumbnail. This means the benefit is a one-time effort: once the thumbnails are enhanced, they’ll speed up performance moving forward.
The trade-off is a slight increase in file size - about 30 KB per file. Personally, I value speed over space since I have plenty of storage, which is what motivated me to create the tool.
The Thumbnail Fixer uses a technology I can’t currently integrate into Photo Organizer because Java 22 EXE files can’t be signed - and this tool is also unsigned due to the cost of code-signing certificates for side projects.
If you have a chance to try it out, I’d love to hear your thoughts! 😊
https://github.com/StefanOltmann/thumbnail-fixer
Kind regards and happy holidays,
Stefan
@stefan Stephan,
Just put my box on for the first time this holiday and installed your new app. Task manager shows the following with the memory taken changing slightly but never using any processor power! The app does not have a window showing that gives you any indication that the app is running, just an icon in the bar called Thumbnail Fixer with a blank icon below the text.
[cid:image001.png@01DB591A.52D31AB0]
As far as I can tell, it’s not doing anything, sorry.
Regards,
Andy Croft
Hi Andy,
thanks for your feedback.
I had this once, too. I believe it could be a problem with the used installer, I’m not sure.
Could you try the portable version?
https://github.com/StefanOltmann/thumbnail-fixer/releases/download/1.0.0/thumbnail-fixer-1.0.0-windows-amd64.zip
Kind regards,
Stefan
@stefan Hi Stefan,
Same thing happens, it appears to be using very little resource and is trickling along. I still only have basically blank pop-up on the icon on the toolbar althuogh I am seeing more useage of the processor flash up in Task Manager. The highest useage I’ve seen is 0.2% with memory useage varying between 136MB and 3.5MB. No indication of what or if it’s doing anything much less if it has completed.
Regards,
Andy Croft
@stefan Stefan,
Does the program check every single thumbnail on the system or only graphic ones in designated folders? It never asked me. For example, my photos live on a different drive to c: they are on f:/Pictures… or at least the majority of them are, I do have some in other places to make other apps happy.
If the app is trying to do all files thumbnails it’s well over 1M to look at rather than 35k which are real photos and they take up only 88GB.
Regards,
Andy Croft
Hi Andy,
I spent the evening investigating the issue you described, and I was finally able to reproduce it on one of my machines.
It turns out that the support for undecorated windows in the technology I used - something I experimented with for the first time in this project - is unfortunately flawed. In some cases, the windows become fully transparent and don’t appear at all.
I’m a bit disappointed because the undecorated version looked so nice.
That said, I’ve created a new version that works reliably now.
Your installation should automatically update to this fixed version. If it doesn’t, you can download it directly using this link: https://github.com/stefanoltmann/thumbnail-fixer/releases/latest/download/thumbnail-fixer-1.0.4.x64.msix
Thank you so much for taking the time to test even my personal side projects - I really appreciate it!
I hope this tool proves useful to you.
Kind regards,
Stefan
@stefan Stefan,
Happy to help where I can. As you can see, the is now working after the downloaded update. It’s been running for quite a while happily chowing through my photos until the following appeared.
[cid:image001.png@01DB5AA8.54D89FD0]
Click ok and it shuts down. Unless I go through the whole pack of photos by hand, I don’t know what it is or where it is residing. Suggestion, display not necessarily the whole address but at least the file name since that would allow the end user to find it quickly with File Manager.
I hope you’ve taken some time off for holiday downtime! As a retired health & safety person I get worried when people put in too many hours and yes, I appreciate if you love your job it is form of relaxation, but it’s not the important break we all need.
Regards,
Andy Croft
Hi Andy,
Thank you so much for the feedback and your help. :)
I've pushed a new version that includes improved error handling, which should prevent crashes at this point.
Hopefully the app will now reliably reach the results screen, where you'll find a log of any errors encountered.
I’ve had some downtime over the past few days, but you’re absolutely right - I’ve been working too much. These issues tend to stick in my mind, and solving them brings me peace of mind.
Kind regards,
Stefan
Hi Andy,
thanks for trying the update.
The tool supports JPG, PNG & WebP - that are the main formats containing embedded thumbnails.
It won't touch TIFF or RAW (which is based on TIFF) to prevent accidently changing a RAW file. The same is true for the Photo Organizer, which only writes XMP sidecars for RAW files. That's because you never want a tool to write to RAW files, which are considered the digital negative. All good apps should only ever read.
It's great to see that it managed to update 20k of your files in just 44 minutes. That portion of your files will be processed really fast by Photo Organizer & the many other tools that make use of embedded thumbnails. :)
I'm interested in the ones that failed. If you like, you can copy & paste the report that follows if you scroll down on the final screen and send me that in private to sol@ashampoo.com, so I can take a look if you encountered errors that I might be able to fix. (That tools doesn't have error reporting or analytics build in for complete privacy.)
Kind regards,
Stefan