exiftool.exe stops working until next reboot - no message, never finishes

[Archive]

[Originally posted by scottg on 2010-01-03 22:01:15-08]

I installed GeoSetter (which uses exiftool.exe v7.89) to geo-tag my photos.  On my Windows 7 box, it seems to work OK, but on the Windows XP machine where I have my photos, it doesn't.  GeoSetter tags a bunch of pictures, very slowly (15-30 seconds each), then stops.  I've left it for a couple of hours, and no further progress happens.

When GeoSetter is stopped, Task Manager shows two instances of exiftool.exe.  Killing those makes GeoSetter continue through the files, but each operation fails (i.e. none of the remaining photos get geo-tagged).  Stopping and re-starting GeoSetter does not fix the problem.  Re-booting does, but (a) that's a pain, and (b) it still hangs up on some random photo (NOT the same one every time).

I downloaded the 8.03 version of exiftool.exe.  When I first boot up, I can run that exe and see help info.  If I then run GeoSetter until it fails, I can no longer run the 8.03 exe.  So something is stuck that is not cleared by killing all exiftool.exe instances.

I have tried deleting the cache-exiftool-7.89 and cache-exiftool-8.03 directories, in case something was locked in there.  No difference -- still can't get either version of exiftool.exe to start.

Any ideas how to either fix or troubleshoot this problem?

[Archive]

[Originally posted by scottg on 2010-01-03 22:41:41-08]

I should perhaps have pointed out that the "very slowly" part is when I save the changes to my photos.  Reading "when taken" times from the photos and calculating the lat/long from my GPX file are fast operations.

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2010-01-04 00:19:04-08]

I have a few ideas.

Are you sure that Geosetter is using the most recent version
of exiftool?  It may help to run exiftool directly from the command line to
perform the same task to see if you have the same problem.

Are these unusually large images?  If so it could be a memory problem.
Windows doesn't have very good memory handling characteristics and
could possibly grind to a halt if you exhaust the physical memory of the
system.  I don't know how to check the memory usage in Windows, but
you could look into this.  If your system is constrained by memory,
then expanding your physical memory may help (ie. buy more RAM).
If not, then perhaps Windows is constraining the maximum memory
used by exiftool, in which case increasing this may help, but I wouldn't
know how to do this.  I'm just guessing here though.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by scottg on 2010-01-04 00:38:12-08]

Geosetter is not using the most recent version of exiftool -- it's using 7.89.  I'll try sticking 8.03 in the GeoSetter directory and re-booting.  Both versions stop working when the problem happens, though: command-line 8.03 hangs without showing help text.

My photos are 6 megapixel Pentax raw files, about 10MB each.  Physical RAM (excluding parts Windows masks out) is 3400MB, and peak commit charge (i.e. in-use physical+virtual) after experiencing the hang at least 600MB less than that.  That ought to be plenty of RAM, I would think.

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2010-01-04 00:47:00-08]

Yeah.  It doesn't sound like a memory problem.  ExifTool has
been used on images larger than 100MB with less memory than that.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by scottg on 2010-01-04 04:08:49-08]

Well it's looking like a bug in version 7.89.  I put the 8.03 EXE in C:\Program Files\GeoSetter\tools, re-booted, and tried tagging a fresh copy of the same photos I did earlier.  It made it through all 62 of them.