We are very happy to announce the release of Photosmith for iPad version 3.0.2.  This is a maintenance release only, and fixes the crashing many users experienced after upgrading to iOS 7, especially when swiping through photos in Loupe and Fulllscreen Views.

Photosmith uses caching to help increase performance.  We cache a number of things, but in particular, we keep photos in memory so scrolling and movement between large images is more responsive.  For example, if you just viewed a photo, then swiped to look at another photo, there shouldn’t be any reason to wait for the previous photo to load again if you swipe back to it – simply pull it out of the already-rendered cache if needed.  It only makes sense, right?

To do this, we made use of iOS’s built-in NSCache for some of our photo caching needs.  NSCache is handy because iOS manages what is kept in cache automatically, discarding anything that it doesn’t have room for anymore.  This is especially handy when writing code that isn’t dependent upon a particular piece of hardware – available RAM varies from around 35MB on an iPad 1 to several hundred megabytes on the iPad 4; we can simply cache as many photos as necessary, and if iOS decides there isn’t enough memory, it will handily remove it from the cache for us.

Except… that’s not what happens in iOS 7. For reasons we can’t quite explain, this appears to no longer be the behavior.  There were no announcements in the iOS 7 pre-release notes (or even in the released SDK documentation) and we didn’t run into the issue while testing beta versions of iOS 7.  And this is why things will work for a while and then crash unexpectedly – NSCache is getting filled up, and iOS 7 is no longer removing photos as it did in the past when cache memory got full.

In Photosmith for iPad version 3.0.2, we still use NSCache, but added some code so that for users running iOS 7, the total number of entries was limited, thereby having a somewhat similar (though not quite as optimal) effect.

Users with iOS 6 (or earlier) will see no difference, as our method of handling this caching issue only applies to iOS 7.  Also, there are no updates to our Lightroom plugin at this time.

We are very interested in hearing your thoughts on Photosmith performance in iOS 7 – please drop us a note over on our User Forums at http://forums.photosmithapp.com.

Photosmith 3.0.2 will be become available today as a free update in the App Store for your country – standard delays may apply as the update propagates through Apple’s servers worldwide.

Posted in: Current Progress, Development, Musings, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Photosmith v2.2.2 is now available in the App Store. It addresses a couple regression bugs introduced with iOS6 support, including the annoying “images won’t delete” bug. There were one or two small bugs reported by users that were addressed as well.

Official change list:

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Version 2.2 of the Lightroom Plugin has been released.

We’ve made some big changes to take advantage of LR 4.x and iOS6, including much faster keyword syncing and GPS support for coordinates created in Lightroom. We also fixed some bugs related to keyword syncing and hierarchies.

Also fixed was a bug where keywords and synonyms would show up in root of the catalog after a sync, although will require v2.2.1 of the app (currently pending review by Apple) to fully resolve. The issue was related to a change in LR 4.x and how it exports images (specifically, how the keywords are exported); this one caught us off guard, since it was an unreported change.

Sync Speed Updates

A number of users have complained about the time to sync. Notably, the time to *re-sync* if there are no or only a few changes. The keyword changes above help out tremendously with this, reducing startup times.

With v2.2 of the plugin, you’ll see some different options at the bottom of the Plugin settings (right click on the publish service and Edit Settings). There are two options:

Changing the selection yields another option:

This should be obvious, but the second option allows for a full keyword sync each time, in case you want to keep your keywords for Photosmith on the iPad the same as your Lightroom keyword hierarchy. The additional option allows you to ignore any keywords that you don’t want to show up in Lightroom.

Lastly, we spent a great deal of time working through the handful of reports we’ve had about inconsistent keyword hierarchies. We’ve made some updates and fixed a couple bugs, and finally thrown everything we can think of at it, and can’t make it break. If you come across something with this version where keywords don’t work right, please let us know.

Results

We created some test catalogs with a dozen images and 15,000 keywords. The time with the 2.1.16 plugin was around 100 seconds to resync, even with no changes. The time with the new plugin using the “faster” option? 5 seconds. The majority of the time was spent churning away with keywords, but with the LR 4.x and iOS6 updates, we’re able to bypass much of that.

We also spent some time optimizing the sync for each image, and was able to that process faster, too.

Keywords in Root

This was an obscure bug. Several people reported that they would add leaf keywords or keywords with synonyms and they would show up later in the root of their Lightroom catalog. We finally tracked this down, after hours of going through syncs with a fine-toothed comb. Turns out that Lightroom is embedding the keywords on export in places we didn’t expect it with LR 4.x, so when Photosmith imported them, it read those into its catalog in addition to the correct ones. The change required both a fix in the plugin and in the app.

However, the existing images in your catalog will still have these keywords. The only way to work around them is, after you’ve updated to v2.2.1 of the app, unselect them from your catalog (Services->iPad Photos, unselect the folders, and rescan), then Purge them (Maintenance->Purge Offline Images), and then re-add them. Confusing, but unfortunately, there’s no other way for the app to know what are valid keywords and what are erroneous ones.

Lightroom 3.x

While the plugin has been tested with Lightroom v4.2, we haven’t forgotten about the users who still want to stick with LR 3.x. The plugin changes all still work with LR 3.x, but unfortunately, due to limitations in the earlier plugin architecture, we can’t make it any faster than it is currently. You’ll see different options in Lightroom 3.x for the keywords.

 

 

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Version 2.1.1 has been successful, with a lot of reports of good, successful syncs. But, like any big, complex software, there’s always something left to do.

Startup times

We’ve had a number of complaints about startup delays. A little background: In order to display a photo correctly and to display the metadata, we need, well, the metadata. And that extraction process takes a second or two per photo.  That’s pretty fast if you’re importing just a couple photos, but if you’re importing a lot, it can add up. And if you need to fast switch out of the app or you quit the app for any reason, then the process stops. This leads to the “metadata not extracted” message that shows up from time to time, with no way to restart the process.

So, in an effort to automatically take care of this for the user, we added a process in 2.1 that would automatically search the photos on startup, and if the metadata hadn’t been extracted yet, then go ahead and do so.

The problem is that this search and update seems to cause a long pause if you have a lot of pictures.

So… yesterday we spent the day moving the process from being an automatic-on-startup process to an option within the Maintenance drawer. You will have the option to reload the metadata for all the pictures or just the ones that the app finds without loaded metadata.

LR 3.x Sync Problem

There was a bug with applying text to the copy name field for the pick / reject status for Lightroom 3.x users. We’ve since fixed that and made plugin 2.1.8 available (as of Wednesday night).

All Photos Syncing

A few users have reported problems when syncing All Photos (notably, an “–allphotoscollection–” collection showing up). We’re still working with users to try to reproduce this issue. We think the problem is in the plugin, which doesn’t require Apple approval, and is thus much faster for us to update. Once we can track down the sequence of steps that cause it, the resolution should be quick.

Update Forthcoming

We typically try to spread out updates to monthly or so, to allow for development planning and development time. However, we’ve had enough reports recently about the slow startup times and we’re doing a quick turnaround, and hope to send out an update to Apple in the next few days. Stay tuned.

In the meanwhile, please contact us directly if you have any other issues so that we can look into them.

We’re keeping up with known issues on this page.

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It’s been a busy few days around here!  Horne just got back from his around-the-world adventure and Apple gave us 5.0 Golden Master (GM).  The GM is the final version of the OS that will be loaded on new devices and what you will get when you upgrade.  You may recall earlier we decided to go ahead and ship our 1.1 update even though Apple hadn’t released the GM yet.  We did this knowing there were still a few outstanding bugs that we had reported to Apple but they hadn’t fixed as of the last beta release.  Now that we have the GM we found that some of them were fixed and some weren’t.  So this 1.1.1 update fixes the things we could work around however, not everything could be worked around.

CAUTION! If you depend on Photosmith and use CRW files do not update to 5.0 yet.
As of our final tests certain CRW files still crash under 5.0 even though they work correctly under 4.3.  We have verified this is not due to anything strange we’re doing in our app and have provided Apple with a sample project that reproduces the problems.  We’ll keep you updated when we get more information.

For everyone else, please update to this 1.1.1 version before upgrading your device to iOS 5.0.  It fixes a couple of potential crashes with the GM version.

P.S. Again, Kudos to Apple. They reviewed and approved our update in less than 2 days even though we didn’t ask them for any kind of rush.

meanwhile… 2.0 progresses.  We’re not stopping work on that folks other than for critical bug fixes like the above. We hear you loud and clear that multi-image tagging is the highest priority in the land.

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