beach ball when attempting to view Photos library

[mikhail]

Hi Nik,

I installed the trial version of RAW Power for Mac. I have a large Photos library (formerly Aperture library) with all referenced photos. When I first launched RAW Power and opened that Photos system library, it showed a list of all my albums and I was able to click on a few albums and see photos in there. Then I double-clicked on a single photo (without the external disk where all the original reside attached), and RAW Power went into the “beach ball” mode. Completely unresponsive. I tried killing and restarting the app (a few times) with the same result. I tied connecting the external drive with the original, but that has not helped. So, at this point the app is unusable. When I launched it, it showed photos from the same album on which it got stuck, and I can’t do anything, any action results in the “beach ball”. Any thoughts/suggestions?

Thank you!

–mikhail

[Nik Bhatt]

Hi Mikhail,

Sorry to hear about this problem. I have not run into it before. For Photos libraries, access to all images is through macOS itself. I imagine there might be some kind of cache that could be at issue. The simplest thing to do at this point is to remove a few files from the application’s sandbox folder. That should clear any stale data.

What the following steps will do is remove any Locations or Favorites that the application has remembered.

1) Quit the app if it’s running
2) Go to the Finder
3) Pick the Go > Go to Folder menu item
4) Paste this in and hit return:
~/Library/Containers/com.gentlemencoders.RAWPower/Data/Library/Application Support/
5) You will see a file called Locations.rpbookmarklist
6) Rename it (e.g., preface with a “-“ or something)

You can do the same thing for Favorites.rpbookmarklist and singleFileEditor.rpbookmarklist

7) Open the app.

If you add directories at that point, the app will make a new Locations.rpbookmarklist, etc.

If that does not help, then the preferences file could also be removed, but that can be step 2.

To remove the preferences file, you can do the following:

1) Quit the app
2) Go to the Finder
3) Pick the Go > Go to Folder menu item
4) Paste this in and hit return:
~/Library/Containers/com.gentlemencoders.RAWPower/Data/Library/Preferences/
5) Delete com.gentlemencoders.RAWPower.plist and 6MR872QP3J.RAWPower.sharedDefaults.plist.
6) Open the app

[mikhail]

Thank you, Nik. Files called Locations.rpbookmarklist, Favorites.rpbookmarklist, and singleFileEditor.rpbookmarklist did not exist in my case. However, the two plist files did exist and removing them seems to have fixed the issue. I was able to browse files in various albums in my Apple Photos system library. However… once I happened to view an album that contained some videos, and I happened to click on a thumbnail representing a video, the same beach ball appeared again, and RAW Power is once again unresponsive. Are videos not supported at all? Or just referenced videos?

Couple additional clarifications, if you don’t mind:

– all of my photos are referenced, but I do not see any overlay icons on top of thumbnails indicating that files are referenced? (Apple Photos does mark references images). Is there a way to visually tell within RAW Power that a photo is a referenced one?

– if I am running RAW Power as a standalone app and view my existing Apple Photos library. Where would it store all the edits? Into that Apple Photos library, right?

– if I am running RAW Power as a standalone app and view photos in a set of directories (not in the Apple Photos library), then all the edits would be stored in the RAW Power application sandbox and photo files themselves will be completely untouched, right?

Thank you,

–mikhail

[mikhail]

Actually, I just ran into the same beach ball issue again (after cleaning up the cache one more time, as you suggested earlier), and this time I did not click on any video files. After launching the app I clicked on a few albums and on one of them the app hung.Thumbnails are shown as empty grey boxes and the larger version of the selected photo is just a black box. Are there any logs I can collect to help better diagnose this?

Thanks,

–mikhail

[thewildrover]

I know this won’t help as such, more of a comment rather than help, but I always had terrible trouble using Referenced files with photos. Indeed, it’s a well discussed thing on various forums.

Since moving mine to an entirely iCloud based system, and using a fully (optimised) managed library, it’s been very stable and rarely has bother with third party extensions like Raw Power.

It might depend on your setup, I had even worse trouble using an external HDD as storage too, but again, since putting it onto my internal SSD, and optimising to iCloud, it’s been fine.

FWIW, I think the Photos library can be a bit fragile, all sorts of anomalies can upset things, could just be a file type it doesn’t like, or just one file that may be slightly corrupt, a dodgy USB cable, or hub, or drive enclosure, anything like that.

[mikhail]

Thanks for the feedback. So, the long story on this is that I was an Aperture user for many, many years, and have accumulated a large library (over 70K photos/videos). Initially, it was fully managed (in Aperture), but after some time I simply ran out of space, and ended up converting the entire library from fully managed to fully referenced. I kept using Aperture for a few years after Apple discontinued it. One day the display on my Mac died, and I had to finally do something.

I ended up converting my Aperture library to Photos library using a second Mac and connecting to the one with the failed display remotely. The Photos library _never_ worked right, for all the well-known reasons/issues with the referenced files (I even filed one specific bug with Apple, with no response from them). I waited a year hoping the next release of Mac OS might fix some of the well-known issues that people have discussed in Apple support forums at length. Now, almost 2 years later, not a single issue with Photos that’s been preventing me from moving forward has been fixed. In the meantime, my ever growing collection of photos is sitting unprocessed, and I really need to find a path forward.

I’ve been monitoring RAW Power for quite some time, really hoping that I could just keep my existing Photos library with all the referenced photos/videos and use RAW Power as the UI front-end for it, and do all my work in RAW Power.

Not sure converting my entire library from referenced to managed is a viable solution, primarily due to current as well as future space requirements, plus the path for that conversion seems unclear as well as really tedious. Putting all the new photos into a brand new library is an option, I suppose, but I was _really_ hoping to have my entire photo collection in one single place…

I did look (many times) at the various other alternative software solutions for photo editing/organization, but none seem to just give me what Aperture offered… RAW Power seems to be the closest in that regard, I just hope I can somehow figure out how to use it with my existing referenced Photos library, so that: 1) I can keep all my photos/videos in one place, 2) I can continue using external USB drive to store all the originals, and 3) I can use an app that works, which is presumably RAW Power (which could have been Apple Photos if that app actually worked).

Other thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks,

–mikhail

[mikhail]

Hi Nik,

Any further thoughts on this? I’d really like to be able to use RAW Power, but it keeps hanging when I open my library, and I have to kill and restart the app, and thus, as of now, it’s pretty much unusable for me. Are you able to offer any additional suggestions on what to try or how to diagnose the issue?

Thank you,

–mikhail

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