Setting EXIF time zone slowdown
Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2017 5:49 am
I recently discovered that since mid-May, images from my phone have been tagged with the incorrect EXIF time zone, so I'm attempting to fix that in all the images I've already downloaded. (I've already found the source of the problem on the phone and corrected that.) Since it's a single action, I figured that I should be able to do it directly from the Browser via the Action menu.
It works well enough—the files that get processed do change to the correct time zone—but the process seems to get progressively slower the more files it processes in a single selected group. The first five images are processed pretty quickly. After about ten to twenty, it's marginally but noticeably slower per file. At fifty files, it's annoyingly slow. At 100, it's excruciating. At about 250, it's going so slowly that it looks like it's locked up—it took more than five minutes to go from 253 files processed to 254. And the estimated time to complete keeps increasing correspondingly.
If instead of selecting all the files at once, I select them in smaller groups, the speed is the same for each file within a single group, but each new selected group starts over at full speed. The first five take about the same amount of time whether I've selected five, fifty, 500, or 5000. But I have roughly 7500 images to fix the time zone on. Selecting them in groups of, say, fifty at a time may cut the total processing time to a small fraction, but that means sitting there and selecting fifty images 150 times. So I can either tie up GraphicConverter (and correspondingly slow down other use of my computer) for the 24+ hours it would take to do all 7500 files in one go, or I can sit there manually selecting groups of fifty files every two minutes for five hours. (The time it would take me to write a script to automate it would negate the time saved in doing it manually, so that's not a practical option.)
If I had to guess at a cause for this, I'd lean towards some iterative loop in the process that's ballooning with each additional file processed. That's just a guess. I think it's something specific to the time zone change routine, because I don't see this behavior with other Action-menu metadata adjustments. I haven't tested all of them, but I do not see it with, say, changing the creation date to match the EXIF date.
This is happening in GraphicConverter 10.5 (2872) on Mac OS X 10.10.5. If there's any additional info I can supply to help track down this problem, just let me know.
It works well enough—the files that get processed do change to the correct time zone—but the process seems to get progressively slower the more files it processes in a single selected group. The first five images are processed pretty quickly. After about ten to twenty, it's marginally but noticeably slower per file. At fifty files, it's annoyingly slow. At 100, it's excruciating. At about 250, it's going so slowly that it looks like it's locked up—it took more than five minutes to go from 253 files processed to 254. And the estimated time to complete keeps increasing correspondingly.
If instead of selecting all the files at once, I select them in smaller groups, the speed is the same for each file within a single group, but each new selected group starts over at full speed. The first five take about the same amount of time whether I've selected five, fifty, 500, or 5000. But I have roughly 7500 images to fix the time zone on. Selecting them in groups of, say, fifty at a time may cut the total processing time to a small fraction, but that means sitting there and selecting fifty images 150 times. So I can either tie up GraphicConverter (and correspondingly slow down other use of my computer) for the 24+ hours it would take to do all 7500 files in one go, or I can sit there manually selecting groups of fifty files every two minutes for five hours. (The time it would take me to write a script to automate it would negate the time saved in doing it manually, so that's not a practical option.)
If I had to guess at a cause for this, I'd lean towards some iterative loop in the process that's ballooning with each additional file processed. That's just a guess. I think it's something specific to the time zone change routine, because I don't see this behavior with other Action-menu metadata adjustments. I haven't tested all of them, but I do not see it with, say, changing the creation date to match the EXIF date.
This is happening in GraphicConverter 10.5 (2872) on Mac OS X 10.10.5. If there's any additional info I can supply to help track down this problem, just let me know.