I got the MyCloud, transferred everything over and the thing worked perfectly for 2 days. Then all of the sudden it decided to start scanning my 1,5tb worth of RAW images (why does it need to do that anyway, WD?!) and the device became completely unusable. I read it was due to converting my RAW files (again, why? I did not ask for it).
But whatever I thought, I’ll let it run and after a few days it should be done. Now after 9 days (!!) it still hadn’t stopped, so I decided to delete my whole RAW archive off the drive.
Here’s the kicker: it is still running two instances of ufraw-batch at 50.1 memory, completely maxing out this thing. I already had raised a support ticket with that “World Class” support of WD, but haven’t heard from them after 3 days of waiting, so I now turn to you.
I already SSH’ed my way into the thing and ran the wdphotodbmergerd and wdmcserverd stop commands, when it stopped for an hour - only to start AGAIN.
Now I ask myself, what RAW files is this thing even scanning? There are none! Maybe a handful of 5-10 files in other folders, but there are never that many RAW files that it should take this long (or does it take 1 day to scan 1 file?). EDIT: I looked, there were 22 raw files still in another folder. Two batches of ufraw-batch were already running 3 hours straight to "scan " no more than 22 files.
Please, let me stop this completely useless feature from ever scanning again. And WD, please throw this feature out. The only thing this does is slowing down your product to a point that many decide to just return it when they still can.
I have the same problem. I got my WD Cloud Mirror yesterday, and after i uploaded 10GB of pictures from by Canon camera in both jpeg and RAW, it started to run two UFRAW-BATCH. It’s been runnning the whole night at 100%, and therefore i just deleted all my RAW files at it today, but its sill running. Sounding like a ■■■■■■■ combat flight over in the corner…
@cat0w Normal My Cloud here - so I posted in the My Cloud forum… I’ve read about the ufraw-batch problem across multiple forums by the way. It is a platform wide feature of WD OS.
@Miniduus exactly how it looks at my end. Two instances converting RAW files.
While in the hell would WD add a feature to convert RAW files?! 9/10 photographers I know let RAW files be handled by applications like Lightroom and the likes, no one wants to access them via the MyCloud app or whatever ufraw’s ultimate purpose is anyway. Basically, you only store them. You don’t want to do anything with them until they’re properly read and handled by Lightroom.
@cpt_paranoia fair enough, but still I have indeed more control over what files are thumbnailed or scanned or whatever. A feature I did not ask for and did not start kept me from using the My Cloud for over 9 days now…
Just made a restore, and the ufraw-batch stopped. Then i uplaoded 1GB of RAW pictures and i started again. It’s so stupid that you can’t turn it off, or at least see a procent of the work done. I have no idea if it’s going to take 1 hour or 3 weeks.
I think it’s a generally problem for the cloud, that you can’t see what it is doing. I would love to see a menu like dropbox, mega, onedrive etc. where you can see what files it is working on.
This might work to find out what files are being processed. You could first ssh into the device. Do a ps|grep ufraw.
now that you know the pid of ufraw-batch. do lsof|grep pid
This will show you what files are opened by a process.
I think I discovered some interesting things today regarding scanning raw files. I think The Mycloud scans the photos from folders with name starting with “z” to “a” (descended order). I will try to explain what I did, excuse me for my bad English.
So, I have a lot of photos in my cloud mirror, including canon .CR2 files. My device was very slow (my cloud mirror) so I decided to do a system restore and rebuild the cloud database.
Using the wd mobile app I could understand a bit of what is going on.
In my photos folder there are a lot of subfolders. So when I first accessed those subfolders with the mobile app there where no thumbnails. In a few hours the thumbnails in the subfolders with name starting with z start to show. In a few hours all thumbnails in folders with name starting on z to v showed up (about 2000 photos). Then in subfolder “viagens” there were like 150 .cr2 raw files and the scanning process got stuck (ufraw-batch process going on). I waited a few hours but the thumbnails on subsequent subfolders u, t and s didn’t show up. I decided to delete the .cr2 files on the “viagens” subfolders and after a while, thumbnails on the folders with name starting with u, t and s showed up. Now it got in folders starting with R where there are more like 150 .CR2 raw files. It has been about 4-5 hours and the process is stucked again with the device trying to scan the raw files.
My guess is that the device can’t, or is very bad, at scanning raw files ( at least .cr2 from Canon 6d). What I don’t understand is that here says the device doesn’t support RAW files, so why is it trying to scanning them? It should just skip those raw files and generate thumbnails only for jpgs, which seems very fast.
It seems like for some reason the ufraw-batch process has some difficult to generate thumbnails from .Cr2 (canon raw) that are in portrait orientation. I used the “ps” command on ssh and I was monitoring the process, it generates thumbnails quite fast, but every time that takes too much time in one file I noticed it was a .CR2 in portrait orientation.
But now, there are 2 files that the ufraw-batch can’t process (both in portrait orientation). I have tried to reboot and disable and enable the cloud access but it has been at least 5 hours that “ps” command shows this
7731 root 9856 S N convert -define jpeg:size=192x192 /shares/Volume_1/PEMA-8TB/Photos/Viagens/Ferias 2013 - Turquia/IMG_3281.CR2 -auto-orient -strip -background #000000 -quality 80 -filter box -resize x192 /shares/Volume_1/.wdmc/PEMA-8TB/Photos/Viagens/Ferias 2013 - Turquia/transcoded_files/IMG_3281.cb62bbdd389b48898f2e5244977cb2c5.jpg
7747 root 252m D N /usr/local/wdmcserver/bin/ufraw-batch --silent --create-id=also --out-type=jpeg --out-depth=16 --output=/shares/Volume_1/.wdmc/magick-uRiqtq0W.png /shares/Volume_1/.wdmc/magick-ocOdPJMr
11893 root 9856 S N convert -define jpeg:size=192x192 /shares/Volume_1/PEMA-8TB/Photos/Viagens/Ferias 2013 - Turquia/IMG_3055.CR2 -auto-orient -strip -background #000000 -quality 80 -filter box -resize x192 /shares/Volume_1/.wdmc/PEMA-8TB/Photos/Viagens/Ferias 2013 - Turquia/transcoded_files/IMG_3055.cb62bbdd389b48898f2e5244977cb2c5.jpg
11899 root 252m D N /usr/local/wdmcserver/bin/ufraw-batch --silent --create-id=also --out-type=jpeg --out-depth=16 --output=/shares/Volume_1/.wdmc/magick-gKQBNDh9.png /shares/Volume_1/.wdmc/magick-3Bgn07va
Is there a way to make the ufraw-batch process skip those files?
One method would be to stop the generation of thumbnails. There is a exiftool that is a perl script. It might run on the My Cloud. If it does then you could search for the files in question and move them where they won’t be processed.
Thats not quite what I want. I want the process of ufrawbatch to skip the “problematic” .cr2 files and been able to finish the scanning process. I have tried ssh commands to disable thumbnail generation in the past, but when I did this, the generation of thumbnail from .jpg and all music files were disable too, and that is not good. I don’t need the raw thumbnails, but I what thumbnails for all other type of files, because the experience is much better, it is a lot easier to find a specific picture away from home if you have thumbnails.
I said “problematic” files, but that is not the right word, because there is nothing wrong with those two files IMG_3281.CR2 and IMG_3055.CR2. I tested, opened them, they are not corrupted, locked or anything else. They are just in portrait orientation.
I just want the NAS to do what is supposed to do. Scan files, generate the thumbnails and then stop the process., allowing me to use the device with no CPU compromising. Its been almost 24 house that the ufraw-batch process is stuck at those two files, consuming a lot of CPU and RAM.
I will try to convert the .CR2 (canon raw) files to .DNG (open source raw) to see if the problem remains. But I will still have the problem that my Lightroom catalogue is huge, I have thousands of .cr2 files. It will take a lot of time and effort to convert all of them and after that I will have to locate and link those new .DNG files in to the Lightroom catalogue to substitute the .CR2.
Man… I can’t believe how buggy this thing is. Can you imagine how many photographers are having this same issue without even knowing? Their devices can be spinning for months with that ufraw-proccess stuck in one single file, consuming CPU, Memory and compromising performance.
Maybe you could try the desktop version of ufraw, to see if it has the same problem with the images, or can give you any diagnostics.
I’d imagine that the version of ufraw on the MyCloud is pretty old (like many packages), so may have old bugs.
Unfortunately, because of the non-standard build used by WD, you can’t simply update the package. Unless some kind soul out there has built a more recent ufraw.
I ended up deleting all cr2 files from the drive and started to use it mainly as a Plex Media Server. Shame it could not work out. By the way it took the drive still 1-2 days to finally realize there were no RAW files left end finally stopped the ufraw-batch process. YMMV.
Still I hope (for their own sake at least) that WD will implement a fix for this. I heard of at least two friends and a colleague that ended up returning the drive altogether because it was simply impossible for the drive to work with ufraw-batch eating up every last bit of memory. That led to a number of people also not buying the drive in the first place.
Yesterday I converted all my .CR2 files to .DNG and uploaded again. It seems that this worked. The device scanned all the files again but it didn’t get stuck on those on portrait orientation. Until now everything is working fine.
Thomas,
I see your RAW photos are CR2 too (Canon). What is your camera? Mine is a Canon 6d.
I think I will replace my device for a My Cloud Home. The wd staff replied me telling that it doesn’t use ufraw-batch
