Fred Slota

Thank you for the reply. I'm fairly certain there is something missing, as your description does not match the behavior that I have been witnessing for years using my two sets of scans. Up until this week, I have not been manually manipulating the thumbnails folder; I would simply switch my picture source and Rebuild the Picture References. If there was a title where all the items had official scans, but I personally own only a single issue and thus have a single scan, when I switched from official to personal and Rebuilt the Picture References, viewing this title there would be only a single thumbnail. Both sources would have folders for the Publisher and Title, the official with many pictures, mine with a single one. If the process you described above was truly the only thing happening, I would be seeing a fully populated set of thumbnails in this title when pointed at my scans and rebuilt. Somewhere there is a process that removes or suppresses thumbnails. Within the next day, I will run the process again taking notes on specific folder states and grid behaviors.

Should there be / Is there a designation for books of the size of recent DC Black Label books, such as Catwoman: Lonely City?

Does this cover fold like a standard gatefold along the right edge for the whole cover, or does it gatefold along the right edge for the right half of the cover only, or does it have a pair of flaps opening light left and right doors, or something else? If the third option, is this simply a Double Gatefold cover, or is there a better description?

A couple of suggestions on a theme. 1) Hard coded or programmable setting or pop-up offer to clear the thumbnail cache when changing the picture location directory. 2) Hard coded or programmable setting or pop-up offer to clear the thumbnail cache when rerunning the Rebuild Picture References process. Both of the above are processes where it is a reasonable assumption that picture information has changed, implying that thumbnails might no longer match. As an additional observation, when I switch from the official folder with 750k scans to my personal folder with 23k scans, and I start browsing through different titles, the system recognizes when items that used to have scans no longer do, and the thumbnail is removed. I'm not sure if this is done during the Rebuild or during the populating of the grid. If this check could be augmented to test the dimensions of the current picture against that currently in the database and force a thumbnail refresh when they don't match, this would get closer to hiding mismatches.

Okay, so the thumbnails are a red herring for what was happening with my "Find missing pictures" search.

Pushed a bunch of Corrected data based on consistency in Item Descriptions.

Currently, a the resultant grid from a Find is titled "Search Results". How about a reminder of what was searched? Especially for Advanced Find, you could easily copy the Find field from the search, as in Search Results: I.[Notes] LIKE "%potato%"

While trawling through Item Descriptions I noticed the overly-detailed description in the above issue and think it needs a little editing: Buck Jones and Mike run smack into a range war, and have to make peace.“Black Giant, the Man from the Grave”starring Zoro The Mystery Man 68-pages, color cardstock covers, 7-3/4-in. x 10-3/8-in. black-and-white interior on white paper stock, saddle-stitched binding. Cover price $3.00

This title is incorrectly entered as being published by Titan, and not Boom!

So, I remembered to point at my picture files this time. Reran my search for Owned without Pictures I.[QtyInStock] > 0 AND I.[PictureFileSize] is NULL and this time the results are correct, listing only the recent issues that I have not yet scanned. Something fishy...

Further thinking suggests that the process might work better if the whole thing was reversed. I'm suggesting that the process find pictures and attempt to match them to database items, as opposed to what appears to be finding database items and attempting to match them to scans. Currently, my official Pictures directory has about 780k pictures and the database has nearly 1.1 M individual entries. Ideally, every picture goes with a matching database entry, meaning that the process is accessing every picture, and is making 320k attempts to access pictures that don't exist, or about 29% that don't exist. For my personal scans, that ratio rises to about 98% that don't exist. If the process ran by walking through the Pictures directory structure instead, you would effectively remove the attempts to access pictures that don't exist. Plus, by walking through the Pictures directory, a report could be generated for orphaned pictures

So, I'm watching the process rebuild Comic Book references for my personal scans, marveling at how quickly and smoothly it is running through 974,129 individual Comic Book issues in the database, and I have a question... Why is it running so smoothly? I have 23,382 scans, from a fraction of the total available titles and a fraction of the total available publishers. If this process were organized by Publisher and Title, a check could be performed on the directory listings to determine if there is a folder for a given Publisher or Title, skipping over large swathes of non-existent pictures and speeding up the process.

So, wanted to retry pointing at my scans, deleting thumbnails and rebuilding the picture references. But, I realized after initiating the process that I had neglected to actually change the picture location. The process, has a stop button. But, when I clicked on it, the button changed to a message "Stopping...", but did not actually stop. Not expecting an unusual response, I wasn't completely paying attention, but I think it stopped processing Comic Books, but continued by doing a full process of Magazines. I suspect the Stop stopped a stage, but not the entire process.

Saw a couple days ago, but forgot to reply. Thank you, and after a little cleanup on my end I'll give it a try.

Okay. I'm looking at Comic Books. I choose "Find | Other..." from the find tools in the top center of the main window. Advanced Find window, Comic Books. Fields drop-down in the upper-right of the window, and there is no "Item Description" in the list of fields. Also no "Item Description" in the "Find | Item Fields" options. Switch to Books while in the Find Window. No "Item Description" in "Find | Item Fields" Switch to Magazines while in the Find Window. No "Item Description" in "Find | Item Fields" So, I don't see it anywhere. v22.0.0.1471, Windows 11 Home, version 21H2 (22000.434), Experience Pack 1000.22000.434.0

Pointed back to official pictures and Rebuilt Pictures only. 1) Thumbnail cache again not cleared, as my personal picture remained the thumbnail for that issue while all the others repopulated from the official scans. 2) Reran my "Owned without pictures" and it found 23, mostly my unofficial specials which wouldn't have official scans, and all truly without pictures. Tomorrow I will try to rebuild back to my scans and try again. Oh, and I just realized that given that there are wa-a-a-a-ay more official pictures, I guess it makes sense that the Rebuild Pictures process takes wa-a-a-a-ay longer.

Just to mention - I think my stand-alone Rebuild Pictures took wa-a-a-a-ay longer then when I rebuilt every list.

I'll check shortly, I'm rebuilding picture lists... To be clear, I'm talking about the tool in the upper right corner of the Advanced Find window. I could get to it by manually typing I.[ItemDescription], but that was after noticing that it wasn't in the tool (so I didn't have to worry about mistyping)

I'm one of those nuts with scans of everything. I yesterday did an upgrade from v21 to v22, with a reload of scans from the four downloaded file. Today, I shifted the Pictures folder to my scans and did a full rebuild of all lists, including all picture references. 1) The thumbnails cache was not cleared. I have a personal scan that's different from one of the official scans. When I went to that issue to upload my scan, the thumbnail image in the grid was the official scan, and not my scan. (Since it was the only cover for that title, it would show up as the large graphic). I went to the thumbnails directory and saw it fully populated. I closed ComicBase, deleted the thumbnails, reopened ComicBase, and the thumbnail for that issue showed up with my scan. 2) With the pictures directory pointed at my pictures, and after the full list rebuild including picture references (and after wiping the thumbnails directory), I executed my saved search for finding issues missing pictures, expecting to see only the most recent couple of weeks of issues. I.[QtyInStock] > 0 AND I.[PictureFileSize] is NULL This returned a list of all my owned issues, with 99.99% of them showing thumbnails of my scans. Apparently, it thinks every owned issue is missing a cover scan, despite almost all of them having a cover scan.

"Item Description" is not listed in the "Field" drop-down of Advanced Find.

Yes, I can, and I do. But, it would be useful for me to be able to access it quicker, and even more useful to those who don't have it saved, or even (*gasp*) those who don't read the forum to find what the proper syntax for that ordering would be.

At that, I'd prefer that to be an option. I prefer having manual control over something like that.

On the Advanced Find dialog, I would like to request a modification of the Order By section. I would suggest a checkbox for "ComicBase sorting" which, if checked, forces "ComicTitles.AlphabetizedTitle, I.[ItemType], I.[IssueNum], I.[Variation], I.[Printing]" in the "Order By" field, and if unchecked, allows you to provide a custom "Order By" as currently takes place.

When ComicBase (not Sidekick, unless that changed) does a content update, it produces a report of Unrecognized Items. The first step on trying to reconcile these items is to see if the Title was moved from Comic Book to Magazine or similar, with the second step verifying if the particular matching item exists in the moved title. It might be helpful if the report could automate and eliminate these two steps. Upon finding an unrecognized item, it could perform a check of the title in the other two mediums, and if found, perform a check on the item in the new title, and indicate these results in the generated report. Ideally, I'm picturing sections for "Unrecognized Comic Book Titles found in Magazines" and "Unrecognized Comic Book issues found in Magazines", etc. Alternatively, it could be parenthetically mentioned in the report line by line after each unidentified item. Minimally, the report could typographically indicate the differences in statuses.

What is the current preferred practice for annotating books with square bindings, like "Wonder Woman: Black & Gold" or "Batman: The Imposter"? Technically, this is independent of whether the issue in question has a cardstock cover, as there are stapled issues that also used cardstock covers. I believe in ye olden days, these would have been entered as "Prestige Edition", but that this is a now-deprecated variation.