[sims] Error Importing Photographs

[glennda]

We are trying to bulk import the students into sims. I have tried it on two seperate machines and each time i try to search for the images the program works its way up to around 1.6gb of ram then crashes with an error about it being out of memory.

 

I have tried just doing year 8's in a reg group (of which there are about 4/5 in each) and it still fails. I managed to get the Year 7's in but any other year fails.

 

Any ideas?

 

Toby

[LosOjos]

Could be the file sizes; have you scaled down the images to SIMS recommended 140 x 180 pixels? (or similar depending on your aspect ratio)

[glennda]

They have been scaled down by the professional company that took them. - i havn't got in the disk on me. but i think the whole 1500 pictures was only about 50mb

[matt40k]

Tried on the server?

[glennda]

yeah does the same - the process gets to 1.6gb of ram and the crashes as out of memory - which must be built into the program as the server as 6gb free

[matt40k]

1.6GB is the 32bit limit... I think? Have you logged it with Capita\LA?

[glennda]

Thats what i assumed. - there is a fix for it but i cant remember what it is - as i had to do it at my last place. Its a config file you have to change i think and as we have moved to a new fresh server (with the sql 2008 upgrade) it has not be changed again.

 

Thought somebody might remember!

[matt40k]

/PAE ?

 

If the photos are 50mb in total and you're doing them in batches, and it's getting to 1.6GB in RAM it sounds like a memory leak, log it with Capita\LA.

[glennda]

I've logged it with the LA. Its pretty resource intensive as it has to compare admission numbers against names of photos - my Support guy is talking to capita at the moment. Im currently running it on a x64 server so /PAE wont work and nor will it on my workstation. Its something built into the client which stops it at 1.6gb ram.

[matt40k]

A blessing?

 

[vikpaw]

How are you importing? If you have all photos in one folder and then try to match to a group that could throw it off. SIMS is pretty poor at memory management and it's easy to crash out the photo importer.

 

I store my photos by year group, then can import a year at a time, sometimes even without selecting the year group, just letting it match across the whole school. It depends on how many photos there are as we take and produce our own. Sometimes if there are a lot then i have to break it down into 2 or 3 batches per year group.

 

Can you try just 10/20 photos in a folder against a year group or the whole school to see if small batches work.

 

Incidentally, we don't scale down our photos as i prefer the quality and it doesnt really affect any of my reports apart from adding a few seconds to run time. They can be scaled down on the reports if need be. I've got 1000x1250 pixel photo at 96dpi, taking around 100KB.

[glennda]

ive tried importing 4 students against a folder of 1300 images and it still fails. the support team are sending me some stuff to change so will see.

[vikpaw]

that sounds the wrong way round, do you mean 4 images against all 1300 students?

 

i've just tried similar with import by reg group, selected 4 photos and didn't specify year or class filter. it took me to 600MB ram, then dropped down to 40MB, but no error, just a massive memory leak. it's everywhere now, the whole PC just froze up for ages, no mouse, no explorer!!

 

foolishly, i'm going to try again with a filter this time, and see what happens...

 

i think if you use import by admission number it should be okay, but again, only import small numbers of photos, and where possible if you can filter by year at the least if not by reg.

[glennda]

we have all the photos taken by the photographers in a folder all names by admission numbers. I specfied the folder C:\images (which has 1300 photos at about a total of 50mb) then selected year 8's in class abc for example which as we run vertical tutor groups there is 4 yr7s, yr8s, 4 yr9s etc. so it looking through the entire list of image names to find 4 admission numbers to pull in the images. It gets to 1.6gb of ram used then crashed.

 

although i did manage to get year 7's in the other day so its not quite so important now but i just fed up of simple things not working with sims!!!

[vikpaw]

I just tried the same thing again but with choosing a filter of Y3, and it worked in a few seconds. It's an odd way to put photos in, i prefer the by admission number routine. I've even gone to the lengths of scripting a file rename based on an export to spreadsheet from sims of admission number against name / reg, but we needed to do that anyway to pull photos into our Oliver db too.

 

Does it actually rely on the folder / selection of photos to be in the correct alphabetical order as matched by SIMS, crikey!

 

If you ever accidentally press the Browse button first before doing anything and find the menu bar disappears, click Ctrl + F4 to close the window then you can reopen and start over. I reported this many moons ago, but as yet no action.

[vikpaw]

not sure how the file size being small is still causing this, but i know that when you do these processes sims locks the photo files as in use. it doesn't just use the filename to do the comparison, it's holding the things in memory in a bad way i guess, and then doing some inefficient coding. you may be better off, splitting off say 100 photos, and not filtering the list, this may be easier.

 

it'll be much easier to break down the number of photos and not filter the year, than the other way around, but i guess vertical groups is not helping you.