Digital Home Thoughts: Photo Book Luxury: Picaboo's Ranch Style Book Reviewed

Be sure to register in our forums and post your comments - we want to hear from you!


Zune Thoughts

Loading feed...

Apple Thoughts

Loading feed...

Laptop Thoughts

Loading feed...



Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Photo Book Luxury: Picaboo's Ranch Style Book Reviewed

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Printing" @ 07:00 AM

Crash, Crash, Crash

If you want to see how a software bug combined with a series of rare circumstances can really ruin a review, keep reading. The Picaboo X process was no longer running, so it had crashed. I was surprised, because Tweetdeck has never crashed on me, which led me to believe (incorrectly or not) that Adobe Air had some serious inherent stability. I re-started Picaboo X and was staring at a blank bookshelf again; it looks like it doesn't save your book until you've finished the initial process. Ouch.

I repeated the previous step, this time watching things more closely. It rapidly scanned through the first 50 images, then slowed down to the previous page of 1.5 seconds per image. When it reached around 100 images, it crashed again. I re-started it and repeated the process yet again — this time watching the Task Manager, playing a hunch about memory usage. Sure enough, when Picaboo X loads, it's using around 120 MB of memory. As it scans the images that it has already scanned, the memory usage creeps up by about 10 MB every couple of seconds. By the time the application has scanned 300 images, it's using about 250 MB of memory. As soon as it hits the images it hasn't scanned though, the memory usage jumps by about 40 to 60 MB per image. After about two minutes, the memory usage hits a staggering 1.6 GB, and the application crashes. I suspect it's some sort of 32-bit memory addressing issue, but I'm not a developer (nor do I play one on TV).

Figure 5: Check out the memory usage of the Picaboo X executable!

Sensing a pattern now, I opted for a brute-force approach: I repeating the image scanning process until all 524 images had been scanned. It took about eight attempts and 15 minutes to do so. I suspect the software is doing thumbnail extraction of some sort, and something about the images I was using was tripping up the process. I did a few experiments with other, smaller batches of images, and the scans proceeded much faster and there were no crashes. These other images were in the 6- to 8-megapixel range, and under 100 images per folder. By comparison, the photos in the wedding folder were between 12 megapixels and 17 megapixels, and there were 524 of them. What was going on exactly?

At this point, I turned to Picaboo's tech support, and I have to say I found the level of support to be superb — under the Help menu, there's a Report a Bug option, and when you submit a bug, it automatically submits a log file. When Picaboo tech support analyzed the log file from my repeated crashes, they discovered a couple of things. First, somehow the images that I was using lacked a thumbnail embedded in the header of the JPEG file. Because the thumbnails were missing, Picaboo X had to generate them, and when it ran into the large 17.4 megapixel images, the process of generating those thumbnails caused the memory usage to get out of control. By the time this review is published, this issue should be fixed with a new release of Picaboo X.

How did I end up with images lacking thumbnails? And how did the images end up 17.4 megapixels in size when they were taken by a 12.1 megapixel Nikon D700? Baffled, I emailed the photographer to ask if the images were up-sampled — I couldn't think of any logical reason why a professional would up-sample nearly every image before giving it to the client — but, sure enough, she confirmed that she up-sampled the images. When I asked why, she never replied with an answer.

While you might want to up-sample an image before printing it to a poster-sized print, it's utterly ridiculous to up-sample every image you have. It needlessly bloats the file size and creates images that are harder to manipulate elsewhere (as evidenced by this section of the review). And even if you wanted to do a poster-sized print, the companies that provide that service have industrial-strength software that will do a better up-sampling job than any consumer-grade software. I really can't hold Picaboo responsible for the decisions made by the wedding photographer; these crashes wouldn't have happened to anyone but me...or another client of this wedding photographer making a book using Picaboo X!


Featured Product

The Canon PowerShot S100 - The incredibly fun and small camera that offers you 12.1 megapixels with a bright f/2.0 lens and full 1080p video recording . MORE INFO

News Tip or Feedback?

Contact us

Thoughts Media Sites

Windows Phone Thoughts

Digital Home Thoughts

Zune Thoughts

Apple Thoughts

Laptop Thoughts

Android Thoughts

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...