Please help! Excel file/media cataloger - hangs when scanning lots of files.

[SarahC]

Hi!

I've written a totally free open source file cataloger which outputs the file list to Excel.
What makes it different is that it uses the awesome ExifTool to do a deep scan of the files, and provides much more information.

It's tailored for video, e-books, and audio, and the spreadsheet output is set up to be searchable, and filterable.

Perfect for an extensive media collection!

The program can be run in a Window, or via the command line/batch file - so it's easy to set up a schedule to output several spreadsheets for different folders, or file types.

All the details are here, along with the source: http://untamed.co.uk/filecatalogue/

It works well, but there's one major sticking problem!

When it scans large folders (1,000+ files) the ExifTool program freezes.
I'm unable to discover the cause, it appears to be a memory issue, and only triggered by some files. In other words, when a large list is reduced to a small list, the file that would freeze the program no longer freezes it.

I use the excellent wrapper from brain2cpu https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=5262.0, and looking through the code I can't see anything there that may be causing the issue.

This file in the source is called : ExifToolWrapper.vb

To try and mitigate the hanging, I added a destroy/recreate sequence that runs on the ExifTool process after X number of files. It doesn't work very well, on big runs it needs to be refreshed after only a couple of hundred file scans, which slows the scanning down considerably.


I know this is a big ask - but it's a very useful program for people with lots of media they want to keep track of.
I don't get any money for it, it's for everyone!

I really want to get a solidly working program out there, and I'm frustrated I've not been able to.

Thanks for your time!

[Phil Harvey]

It sounds to me as if it is a problem in the VB wrapper, and not ExifTool.  I recommend posting this problem in the thread with the VB wrapper and hope that brain2cpu is monitoring that thread.

- Phil

[SarahC]

Hi Phil!

I will, thank you!