I have been sent a 300Mb RW Classic Stacks5 project file to investigate.
As I don’t use Classic, I renamed the project extension .rwc to .rw8 following the suggestion from RM Support and the project file opened ok. Unfortunately, it ooks like only local images have been used, and many are missing from the project file and sure enough there are 11 Stacks Image Backup folders totalling 250Mb.
My main question, is can these backup images be automatically put back into correct place in all the missing images? If so how?
I have no idea what image goes where in the project file.
Have tried just copying them to the folder where the others remain?
Is .rwc project file the same as .rw8? In that case it’s another bloated argument (did I here someone say “lie”?) to upgrade to RWC. Anyway, if the project files are structurally different, perhaps open it with a trial version and see if it presents the same situation to you.
There are 11 folders of seemingly random images. Copy to where exactly? My main issue is that I have many project pages with missing images and no idea how to reconcile the 11 folders of images with the missing image blank image wells.
One other very thing is that most of the images in teh backup folders, are webp. The project is Foundry based so I can’t understand where the webp images are comming from.
I haven’t investigated into the stacks folder structure, but isn’t there a folder that contains other images? I’m not at my computer right now but I will check later. The random images couldn’t that be the result of images hopping over (as we discussed here?
Yes it is exactly that, and why the project file is bloated by 250Mb. I had many conversations about this issue with Isaiah, and he explained that the seemingly random folders of images are folders of “hard links” and therefore the files don’t exist in those folders and deleting these files, has zero effect on your system. My experience is that if you delete them, you certainly do recover space and reduce the project file size.
However, I can accept that RW just looses local images, crashes, etc., but if there is an active Stacks process to backup images, then what use is that unless images can be restored to where they should be. I can’t find ant way to recover missing images that physically exist on these hidden folders.
I know this doesn’t help at all … but what a nightmare! Ugh.
A few years ago I went to warehoused only use of images (except in rare cases where I couldn’t due to how a stack worked). I did this because I ran into a similar situation although at much smaller scale.
I don’t know if this is Stacks, RW, or some combo of the two. But it surely should be a high priority to fix … but obviously that’s not going to happen right now. I hope Stacks Pro eliminates this kind of issue.
Somewhere along the line in the past 4 months Isaiah released a version of Stacks that was supposed to fix a lot/most image problems. Using latest stacks? (I assume so.)