Re: Corruption causing Gramps to crash

> I am uncertain what exactly you want me to do, in particular:
> "rename the duplicate entirely" what exactly does this mean? 

Ever since the default in Windows was to hide file extensions, the OS changed how " select a file & rename" works.  Now when you select a file and go into text editing, the OS deselects it and then re-selects just filename without the (invisible by default) dot & extension. 

So the worry is: the re-select might skip a non-printable character that is screwing everything up.

My OS is set to never hide file extensions. So  when I rename a suspicious filename, after that OS re-selection, I do a select-all (ctrl-A) and manually type the whole thing... including the dot & extension.

> when I select it in the Media view, gramps crashes immediately.

This is an important troubleshooting issue for any long-term Gramps user. 
Sooner or later, the Preferences file is going to cause you grief.  And it can be a twinge of pain (if you know how to work around it) or hours of agony while you wonder if your research is permanently lost. 

Too many add-ons and tweaks affect the preferences file and it is rewritten too many times a session for it to be stable. At some pint... it will become corrupted during a write error; or, an add-on will write a parameter that an update doesn't recognize; or, you Configuration will have been changed in an incompatible way to the last save. 

But the most likely scenario is that you will have tried order a View to do something impossible and Gramps went into a endless loop. After you kill the app, restarting brings Gramps back to the same remembered view trying to do the same impossible endless loop. You will, in effect, be locked out. 

(I've created more than a few impossible Custom Filters.)

The quick way to verify that the Preferences is the primary cause of death is to quit Gramps, drill down into the User Directory for the gramps.ini file & rename it. The next time you start Gramps, the default preferences will be used.  

For your media problem, this works fine. With the Media Preview Gramplet inactive, you can delete the bad media record, quit Gramps, delete the freshly generated gramps.ini file & restore the old renamed file back again.

But in many cases, you will need to clean out the corrupted piece of the gramps.ini preferences file instead. (Because it is a real challenge to remember all those niggling Configuration tweaks... such as media paths, format customizations for IDs, colors, names/place/date formats, etc.) 

Unfortunately, Gramps has absolutely no built-in Preferences recovery feature. You have to do it manually.

Fortunately, the preferences file is in a "chunky" format. So you can just scroll down to the chunk named for the feature causing grief & excise the whole chunk. (Naturally, you will have made a backup before butchering the preferences file with such meatball surgery. As you become a better surgeon, you can attempt to repair rather than amputate.) 

-Brian 
 
  On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 10:45, David Lynch<[email protected]> wrote:   On 22/11/2021 14:09, [email protected] wrote:
> Ok. Maybe it is the Media's filename, thumbnail, or JPEG structure.
>
>
> How about duplicating the file "christening - Agnes Clare Lynch.jpg" & 
> renaming it to something like "christening_ACL.jpg". Highlight and 
> rename the duplicate entirely... So you will be confident that there 
> are no unprintable characters.
>
>
> You may want to delete it from the Media view before re-adding the 
> duplicate to the Event. That should clear it out from a different 
> place than where the crash is occurring.
>
>
> Make sure the duplicate can be opened in your default JPEG viewer 
> program.
>
>
>   <file src="Certificates2/christening - Agnes Clare Lynch.jpg" 
> mime="image/jpeg" checksum="3c967528b327bb410dd094650a1f21f5" 
> description="christening - Agnes Clare Lynch"/>
>
> -Brian

I am uncertain what exactly you want me to do, in particular:

"rename the duplicate entirely" what exactly does this mean?

"delete it from the Media view" I can't do that because when I select it 
in the Media view, gramps crashes immediately.

Here's what I have done:

Copy Certificates2/christening - Agnes Clare Lynch.jpg to /christening - 
Agnes Clare Lynch.jpg

Rename /christening - Agnes Clare Lynch.jpg to /christening - ACL.jpg

Move /christening - ACL.jpg to Certificates2/christening - ACL.jpg

Open C13656->Gallery

Delete Media christening - Agnes Clare Lynch

Add Media christening - ACL.jpg (by drag and drop)

Media->select christening - ACL -> crash

David




  
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