Phototheca

Once again I find my confidence in Adobe shaken, this seems to be a more common occurrence than being impressed by their efforts, indeed it seems to me that over the last couple of years Adobe have been a driving force behind improving products for half a dozen other image editing products because Adobe have decided to shy away from the non professional market. Their choice, seems short sighted to me but if you have a pigeon that needs holing feel free.

As a result I have been looking for a Digital Asset Management tool because there are plenty of excellent image editing products out there, I am currently experimenting with DxO, I've repeatedly tried Olympus' own product (it's appalling, no two ways about that, Windows 3.1 style and performance, come on a bit of basic design and a half way decent programmer would sort that) and I've been having some time with Darktable. That is an interesting program because whilst it is miles off on look and feel the jpg files it generates are fantastic, I had no idea that all programs were not created equal on that front.

So DAM software :

• Digikam, conceptually excellent, on Windows it's clunky and doesn't write standard format tags which is pretty pointless. 
• Picasa, it still works, tags work fine but location tagging has stopped working.
• PhotoTheca, I rather liked the look of this product but the free version has a 5,000 photo limit and the first folder I tried to experiment on have just over 1,000 files and the program tried to only load around half of those and then crashed.
• Lightroom, much as really dislike adobe nowadays and keywords are dog slow to add and geo tagging has stopped working on my version it is still the only DAM I have found that is remotely respectable at the moment.

adobe genuine Software Integrity Server defeating adobe staff

I had a problem where the Adobe genuine software integrity service starting popping up last weekend, it took a couple of days before it popped up and stayed open. I spent an hour and a half on chat (and 14, yes 14 different people, each one unable to read the thread) to discover that none of the chat "staff" had any clue what this software was. They listed it as a Lightroom 5 install issue, nice. Agreed a call back in 2 days.

Next day, pop up pops up and stays up, seems I have used 30 of the 40 days. I phone and get someone who appears to have a clue - apparently I have a dodgy copy of Adobe reader pro. Never had that, not sure what I would do with it. So I ran the adobe supplied cleaner, she took control of my machine and ran the adobe supplied cleaner.

Another hour an a half of my life lost.

1 week after the original issue I get a call back, but I was at work so they closed the call.

2 days later pop up returns.

Another hour and a half on chat and control of my PC, to be fair this one had also not heard of software but at least knew what a computer looks like. still no luck. Agreed a call back in 4 working days when I know I will be home.

It seems to me that there is a distinct lack of training on the complete Adobe product set and I've wasted a lot of time on a problem that no one can explain.

Have taken action and uninstalled all the other bits of adobe software that have accumulated on my machine - it seems I had 2 versions of flash, 2 versions of digital media editions and hoping it's enough.

Come on Adobe if you are going to drop software onto computers make sure it works right and your staff know about it.

Windows 10 fall Creators Update - an update

I called the Adobe helpline and 13p a minute and £1 later I spoke to a person who agreed to call me back in 30mins. 2 hours later nothing but a post from someone on the Adobe forum did help and I uninstalled, rebooted and reinstalled the C++ redistributable x86 and x64 versions and finally working Lightroom.


To be fair it was not a bad two hours, my son and I made slime with a reasonable degree of success, from https://theimaginationtree.com/easy-uk-slime-recipe-contact-lens-solution/ .

Our only mods were that we had to experiment with the contact lens solution (Superdrug, it's £10 for a large bottle!) and our best result so far was with around 4ml of it (we used those little baking spoons with markings for ml and proportion of teaspoons on them to be more accurate) - it's pretty running but doesn't snap. I also found a nicer feel by mixing the bicarbonate of soda with a tiny amount of hot water to melt it first.

Last comment - I thought I used a lot of glitter, it needs a lot of glitter - I suspect the whole tube I had would still be insufficient.


Update .. that solved the Genie Timeline issue too it seems (the reinstall not the slime)

Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

Microsoft's Windows 10 Fall Creators Update dropped onto my PC last night.

I was entirely unaware it was coming until my PC churned for an hour.

What improvements are there?

Do alerts such as Outlook appointments pop to the top like Windows XP and previous versions? No.
Is it possible to open a 2nd password protected spreadsheet without clicking back on the first sheet first like Windows 7 ? No.

Can I connect my phone to Windows using a 2nd rate browser that has reported battery consumption issues? Yes.

Come on Microsoft, deliver updates that are useful.

More importantly test your software properly first.

Power Budy :dead
Avast Anti-Virus : dead
Genie TimeLine : dead
SQL Server VSS Writer (a Microsoft product for pete's sake) : dead
OnePlus drivers : lost

Plenty of people are reporting issues, Power Buddy has been updated, Avast has been updated.

After multiple uninstalls of random bits of Visual C++ redistributable the SQL Server VSS Writer has sprung back into life but no idea which one worked as was randomly pressing buttons.

Lightroom? Nothing, I get a "Could not call C function: private_load_agCoreTech" error. Many people have this issue and I'm not the only one that the fixes do not work for (Visual C++ redistributables & replacement DLLs).

Who to call for support? Well it turns out that it is impossible to talk to a person for less than 13p a minute or use online chat for lightroom - it's down to community forums which are not actual support. I have tried updating the product to the latest release and tried installing the brand new CC Classic product but both have the same problem.

I did manage to get a call back from Microsoft who announced not their problem because Adobe should have made the product work properly, they could however help me roll back and turn off updates entirely.

So completely useless support system and once again inadequate testing - I can accept that a small vendor like Genie9 has a product that has died (disappointing though that is) but a major provider.

Oh well I was looking for an Adobe replacement anyway - I hate them all but if they work then that's the answer.

Adobe Lightrom 6

Once again I would like to beg Olympus to update their Olympus Viewer software so that it is usable because Lightroom is driving me nuts again.

So I have been having a problem that appears to be getting worse where as an editing session extends in time the performance of Lightroom diminishes.

Of late I have been keyword photos, approx 700 in a catalogue of 3000, well within the alleged capabilities of the product. After a few minutes responsiveness notably drops eg clicking to select an image starts to take a few seconds to respond. This continues until Lightroom becomes unresponsive. Other programs remain entirely unaffected and processor / memory / disk appear to be responding normally but Lightroom has lost itself. Unfortunately, if I leave it too late to restart Lightroom it is impossible to kill and my PC becomes unresponsive.

I have of course updated to the latest version 6.10.1 but that has made no difference at all.

There are multiple posts online with performance problems but there is a more fundamental issue and that is the "too_many_redirects" issue preventing login to Adobe forums.

I have no tried on Windows 10 Chrome, Edge and IE and all have the same problem. I have tried changing my profile name (why would that make any difference I ask!) and that does not work. I have tried on Android and that doesn't work.

Adobe seems to have a notably interest in charging significant sums of money for professional software and then appear to be unable to back that up with professional product or support.