Difference between the various synchronisation methods
Peakto has been designed to keep track of the changes happening in the underlying catalogs.
It will notify you when changes are detected via a dedicated icon in the sidebar, next to the source, but it won't run the sync. This task is left to you because we want you to decide when you think that synchronisation is worthwhile.
So what are the different options available and what are the differences between them ?
These options are accessible from the contextual menu of a source
- Synchronize Now... : this is the most basic option. It will gather all changes by analysing added/removed images, adjusted images and metadata, changes in albums and structure and will update the source in Peakto. The changes are detected in a time window that starts at the last ingestion/sync until the current time. In theory, this command should always do the job, but there are situations where it does not (see below)
- Custom Sync... : this option will extend the time window where changes are looked for to 1hour, 1day, 1 week. This is a good way to pick up changes that "Synchronize Now..." is missing when Peakto wrongly thinks that it is up to date. It will look at the history in these time windows and replay the changes in Peakto.
- Smart Reingest: this sync option is the more thorough synchronisation as it will use a completely different strategy. Rather than looking for changes, it will reprocess all the catalog and decide whether each object (master, version) has really changed. It will skip the objects that are the same, and in doubt will reprocess the others. A smart ingest is significantly faster than an initial ingest because it should skip a lot of costly operations (thumbnails calculations, AI calculations,...)
- Rebuild Missing Thumbnails: this is a sync operation that is aimed at reparing sources that were properly ingested but for which some thumbnails are missing. This scenario could arise if you force quit Peakto during the last phase of the computation of thumbnails or if you cancel an ingestion during that phase. As its name tells it, it will detect the missing thumbnails and compute them. You can also compute a missing thumbnail on a single version if you want.
- Compute Missing AI Scores...: this is a sync operation that is aimed at completing sources were AI data is incomplete. This situation arises if you cancel the aesthetics (AI) computation that happens at the end of an ingestion. It will only compute the missing scores. This option is also useful if you activate more scores from the Preferences screen: in that case, Peakto will know which are the new scores that need computing and will only compute those.
- Run Images AI Analysis...: this is not a sync operation. It recomputes all the AI scores from scratch.
Why is "Synchronise Now..." not the only option ?
One could think that "Synchronize Now..." should be the only option. But it can miss changes for various reasons:
1. some catalogs do not expose the date at which a change was made...which makes any attempt unsuccessful to gather all changes between the last synchronisation and now.
2. some catalogs defer the actual writing of a change you make to later. If you run a sync Peakto will detect nothing (as the change was not written yet), but it you run it later, if will fail to detect it too because the window of change has moved and the change falls now outside of the window
This is why we introduce Custom Sync: it allows to replay the changes that happen in a fixed window of time
Finally Smart Reingest is the ultimate tool to sync everything, at the cost of a longer computation time.
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