Can I stop DPP from looking at all my images on 4 TB of internal SSD ?

[mangurian]

I work extensively with my images and when I start DPP it usually takes a very long time before I stop getting a "busy" cursor.  Once it is finished doing whatever it's doing (updating a database ?) everything works smoothly.  I have one "working" directory for images.  Is there any way to have DPP just look at where I work ?

Thanks

[samarak]

Hey Marc,

As I said in my reply to Waddizze, it's easy so I'm willing to try it at this point even though I don't think it should matter to any well-written software.

Thanks for your responses today.

Steve

[March411]

Hey Steve, top of the day to you!

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@mangurian wrote:

I don't think it should matter to any well-written software.

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That one made me chuckle, if you look back at all the replies you'll notice that nobody responding said it was well-written. DPP has a bit of history of being a bit quirky. If you do a site search you'll find that folks using Macs tend to scream the loudest.

It's a decent piece of software but is slow and clunky and has some challenges. Some people have zero issues while others pound their head up against a wall, like you. The people responding here are attempting to help you based on our experiences and knowledge of the software history from previous member posts.

I may have missed it in one of your posts but if you are not using the latest release you may want to grab it from here:    EOS / PowerShot / SELPHY Apps & software 

[SignifDigits]

I don't know whether it's well-written or not.  I know the Windows 11 DPP and PPL uninstall process is unsatisfactory in that it leaves residual files and settings, so if a call or instruction includes "reinstall" it is NOT the same as a "fresh install".  It leaves pesky residual settings, including the last-known directory path.  I now have both DPP and PPL working well on my private 8TB cloud-based storage and USB-connected 4TB SSD (though for speed I use my local SSD for processing).

My frustration period with DPP is documented at https://community.usa.canon.com/t5/Camera-Software/Canon-DPP-only-works-with-WIFI-OFF-on-Asus-ProArt... 

For DPP it was mostly my fault that the the network connections were not configured properly, though I think the SW could have been written better to avoid my issues. 

I think Canon should more widely publish how to do clean installs of PPL and DPP and provide their own uninstall scripts as others do. This would be a simple thing for them to do.  I recently documented how to do the fresh install of PPL (which would also apply to DPP) at https://community.usa.canon.com/t5/Printer-Software-Networking/Professional-Print-and-Layout-Canon-i... 

In your situation I would recommend a fresh installation and then use the advice of others to target what I would call an empty "working folder".  That is the configuration that I use with good success.

[samarak]

Ah. I was trying to be diplomatic and avoid the terms I'd usually use for software with a glitch like this. And, after all, Canon provides it free of charge, and I do use it a lot. But I've run into other ... quirks. A few years ago I found a version that would crash if pointed at a folder containing JPEG images to which I had added tags via Windows Explorer. Everything else was fine with them. Took me a bit to diagnose. At least that one seems to have been fixed. 

I'm on 4.20.10; I'll install the latest.

Thanks.

[samarak]

Thanks, SignifDigits - that's good information. As I mentioned somewhere, I did a quick browse of the registry for "Canon"' and "DPP" without finding any smoking guns or suspicious debris, but when I'm a bit less behind I'm going to dive deeper. I actually considered sandboxing DPP entirely - running it under a set of credentials created just for it, and restricting its file system access to a narrow set of folders so it simply could not get to anything I didn't allow. I've done that before, for apps I didn't trust, but it's a lot of work. Often you find the app is doing things behind the scenes that surprise (and sometimes horrify) you and require extra work, and some apps are so messy it's almost impossible.

Steve

[SignifDigits]

Good luck.  I use it a lot as well, and for free it could be a LOT worse, which, in fact it was previously.  It was bascially unsuable for me for some time and I sprung for an Adobe license.  Then Adobe violated users' trust in them and I switched back to DPP with good success.  For lens correction, and probably a few other things, I trust Canon's SW more than any others.  And for free it's pretty powerful.  No complaints about that from me.  Thankfully I think/hope Adobe fixed their user license issue that I found offensive, so I might get a license again someday.  For now I'm exploring everything that's free, which will take me a while.  With DPP it also helps, I'm sure, that I'm using a lot faster computer.

I wish you the best but my suggestion is simplify first, get confident in basic usage, then consider something more complicated.  I wouldn't spend any of my valuable time unless I was comfortable that the basics/foundation was firm.  Sandboxing could be a way to do just that, for sure.  Let us know how it goes and how we can help.

[Jkarl]

As far as the Windows registry goes I did a comparison of the registry before and after installing DPP, and did not see anything that sets the parameters for scanning the drives drives. 

[SignifDigits]

Probably correct.  The previous poster that I helped with PPL didn't need it.  I used Cleaner and it did remove a registry entry, but I don't think there's anything there that has to be removed.  Those invisible files DO have to go though for sure.  I found that out during my MANY DPP reinstalls that were NOT clean reinstalls.

[samarak]

Thanks Jkarl, that saves me having to do that. That's one of the things that bothers me about this episode - as I've mentioned, I've never ever had DPP pointed at the install directory that had those CAB files in it, ever. And it should not be scanning CAB files anyway. But not only was it, it obviously had something persistent because even after killing it and ensuring there were no processes hiding, it would immediately resume scanning those files. Only moving that directory elsewhere stopped it. I have no idea what caused it to focus on those files, not where it stashed its status info. Code usually doesn't exhibit random behavior, but since I don't know the trigger, it appears random to me, and that means it could happen again tomorrow, or not for a year. But with DPP, I'd guess sooner rather than later.

Steve

[Jkarl]

Would you like a text copy of the results?