Always Optimising Photos

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Wolffe

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Is it normal for iTunes to want to optimise my photos each and every time I run it? I haven't touched my photo directory yet within a minute or so of running iTunes (Windows) it will begin optimising my photos again.

I could understand if it was looking for changes but the progress bar moves so slowly that it seems to be converting all of my photos again.

I keep skipping the process but later today I will let it finish again and see what it does next.
 
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iTunes should normally only do this once. The photos themselves are stored in an "iPod photo cache" directory on your computer. The exact location of this directory depends on the program you're using to manage your photos. If you delete this directory, iTunes will need to re-run the optimization process in order to recreate these cached files.

Also, of course, if it's never been allowed to finish the process, it's going to keep trying. As you've suggested, let it run overnight, finish what it's doing, and then see if it does it again. If it does run to completion and it still wants to optimize your photos next time you sync, I would check to make sure that the photo cache directory isn't being deleted somewhere along the way, and/or your photos themselves aren't being updated in any way (even a timestamp update on a photo may cause it to re-optimize).
 

Wolffe

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Just an update -- it seems that iTunes keeps complaining that it couldn't copy all of my photos because some of them couldn't be found.

It would be REALLY nice if iTunes offered even the slightest clue as to which files these would be (does iTunes maintain a log somewhere?).

I don't understand how it would have a problem finding a photo considering it generates its own file list from the selected folder. The error message is probably inappropriate for what actually happened.

Anyway, iTunes probably wants to optimise my photos each and every time because it thinks the last update did not complete -- though as far as I can tell, all my photos are on my iPod.

I guess I have to settle with skipping the optimise process each time because it would be a ton of work to narrow down where iTunes is encountering its problem.
 

Wolffe

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One more update...

I wiped out all of the photos on my iPod and deleted the cache on my PC. This time when I resynced, it gave me an error about not being able to copy certain files but this time it named one file.

It seems that iTunes doesn't like files with long file names. Someone had given me some photos with fairly verbose descriptive file names and iTunes just didn't like them at all. Once I renamed them iTunes was able to synch them.

Afterwards, iTunes encountered a corrupt .JPG in my collection which it said it couldn't copy because the iPod can't display it. Once I deleted this file, my entire collection synched and it hasn't bothered me about synching my photos since.

The interesting thing was that this time around, iTunes only attempted to reoptimise the problematic files between attempts whereas before it wanted to constantly reoptimise my entire collection.

Even though I've loaded a bunch of photos on my iPod, I really don't use my iPod for its photo capabilities (go figure). Regardless, they really need to flesh out this functionality in iTunes. It really looks like a rushed last minute update to the software.
 
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