# Capital X (Reject and auto-advance) stops working, sometimes



## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 25, 2015)

Wondering if anyone else is seeing this.  I use the cap X key to reject and advance to the next image a lot.  It works even in Develop even in crop mode (where lower x is rotate aspect).

Except in LR 6, especially after running a while, it stops working.  Exit LR, start over, it works again.

It's happened a dozen times at least.

I'm not a big shortcut user (in many ways I think they are awful and arcane), so maybe there's something I am hitting that disables it?


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 25, 2015)

If that's easily reproducible, it would probably be worth putting in a bug report at the feedback site. I hope/expect the Adobe folks will be monitoring and collating such issues.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 25, 2015)

Jim Wilde said:


> If that's easily reproducible, it would probably be worth putting in a bug report at the feedback site. I hope/expect the Adobe folks will be monitoring and collating such issues.



Well, that's why I am asking if others are seeing it.  Me reproducing it on my system (who knows what else is interacting with the keyboard) is not very definitive.  Plus, well... it happens a lot is different from reproducible - I have no idea what puts it in that mode.

Lightroom has always been a bit flaky with some features just stopping working, and a restart fixes them.  Sometimes its drag and drop, sometimes a shortcut.  But in the past it has been a couple times a month (and I'm a very heavy user).   This cap-X thing has been several times a day.  So if no one else is seeing it (and does use it)... not sure where I look, but I look in my PC.


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## clee01l (Apr 25, 2015)

Jim Wilde said:


> If that's easily reproducible, it would probably be worth putting in a bug report at the feedback site. I hope/expect the Adobe folks will be monitoring and collating such issues.


It would also be helpful to have a count of how many (X) activations happen before the (X) activation stops working.  There may be a do-loop counter that is at play and once you exceed the do-loop limit the counter stops.  It is a simple code fix IF you can identify the do-loop.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 25, 2015)

I just can't see a pattern.  I just had it happen again -- I did about 40 tethered captures.  In the first few I did a X and it worked.  When done I moved on to filing some of the captured photos, as well as a few others, into other directories.  In doing that I tried X again and it didn't work at all.

Note when it stops working it is not that it doesn't auto-advance -- it just does nothing at all.  Upper X and nothing happens.  Lower x and it marks reject.  Same with upper U (for unmark), nothing happens.  Lower u works.  I go into Notepad and both do exactly as you expect.

Exit lightroom, restart - works fine. 

No pattern I can see.

No one else is having it happen?


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 25, 2015)

I've tried to get it to break on both platforms, without success. On the Windows platform I just rattled through and ejected 400 images using the Shift-X combination, but no issues at all. Of course, it may have been an invalid test, i.e. too quick. But at least I tried.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 25, 2015)

Jim Wilde said:


> I've tried to get it to break on both platforms, without success. On the Windows platform I just rattled through and ejected 400 images using the Shift-X combination, but no issues at all. Of course, it may have been an invalid test, i.e. too quick. But at least I tried.



Thank you.  That probably means something on my system.  No real idea where to start, but unless someone else chimes in it sounds like not-Lightroom.


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 25, 2015)

I wouldn't say definitely not-Lightroom. For sure I often see some very laggy behaviours during longer sessions, notably during metadata entry, which occasionally require a restart. What you're seeing may be just more of the same....the inconsistency tends to point towards a system resource issue maybe. If it gets to the point of being a real bore, you could try a prefs reset I suppose.....if I ever get a break I'll finish off the update to my prefs reset document, as LR6 has introduced a new way of doing that.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 25, 2015)

Jim Wilde said:


> I wouldn't say definitely not-Lightroom. For sure I often see some very laggy behaviours during longer sessions, notably during metadata entry, which occasionally require a restart. What you're seeing may be just more of the same....the inconsistency tends to point towards a system resource issue maybe. If it gets to the point of being a real bore, you could try a prefs reset I suppose.....if I ever get a break I'll finish off the update to my prefs reset document, as LR6 has introduced a new way of doing that.



Could be.  I've run into that as well, in fact just did while doing un/stacking and metadata changes and file moves, interestingly enough.

But makes it real hard to track down. 

I hate deleting preferances -- I never manage to quite get them all back and then for weeks am stumbling across one.  :(


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## jstiles (Apr 26, 2015)

I'm having the exact same problem, real annoying.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 26, 2015)

jstiles said:


> I'm having the exact same problem, real annoying.



The Cap X part or slow down in metadata work?


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 26, 2015)

Ferguson said:


> I hate deleting preferances -- I never manage to quite get them all back and then for weeks am stumbling across one.  :(



I agree, it's getting all the plug-ins re-installed that I hate spending time on. Easiest thing is to rename the existing prefs, let LR create the new ones, see it it's fixed the problem.....if it has, great, but now you've go to get the new prefs just the way you wanted them. But if it hasn't, delete the new file, rename the old one back, restart. That's the way I do it.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 26, 2015)

Jim Wilde said:


> I agree, it's getting all the plug-ins re-installed that I hate spending time on. Easiest thing is to rename the existing prefs, let LR create the new ones, see it it's fixed the problem.....if it has, great, but now you've go to get the new prefs just the way you wanted them. But if it hasn't, delete the new file, rename the old one back, restart. That's the way I do it.



That's a good thought.  I've tried reading through the files as reminders for setting things back up, but my guess is most times resetting does not fix the problem anyway.

I find it interesting how over the years resetting preferences, when it does fix something, has become equated with "problem solved" and maybe even "you did something wrong" as opposed to "since only Adobe writes to the darn file why isn't this a bug and why are you not interested, Adobe".  :(


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 26, 2015)

I agree, but unless you have a reproducible issue, how are they supposed to fix it?

BTW, not sure if plug-ins also write into the prefs.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 26, 2015)

Jim Wilde said:


> I agree, but unless you have a reproducible issue, how are they supposed to fix it?
> 
> BTW, not sure if plug-ins also write into the prefs.



Yeah, sorry... I spent my life in software development.  I've probably even said that statement a lot, but it's an excuse. 

Adobe products have always been "fragile" - almost a need to consult a Feng shui expert rather than a manual.  Mystery issues abound.  Just yesterday in shooting a series of tethered capture to digitize negatives, after four runs, the fifth wouldn't recognize the camera when I turned it back on.  Same cable, same setup -- everything the same. Change cables, reboot, change cables again, face north and stand on one leg, restart lightroom, hold the camera vertical instead of horizontal... and suddenly it just works.  Google "No camera detected" and see how often it happens.  Yet every single time Windows saw it and gave me a device for it -- but Lightroom can't see it.  Sometimes.

All their photo products tend to be like this, and over the decades we have collectively learned to accept it.  

Imagine if someone hired Adobe to build the reactor control system for a nuclear power plant near your home.  How would you feel?   :disgusted:


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## Linwood Ferguson (Apr 26, 2015)

So more to the point.... let's say one has a frequent but not reproducible issue (by that I mean one doesn't know exactly how to reproduce it).

Are there tools to collect data?   Like a debug mode for Lightroom? 

For example, the lightroom plugin for Smugmug has a log file you can turn on, that lots a LOT of information on everything it does.  You turn it on when it is acting flaky, and send them the log, and (mostly) magic happens and they fix it very quickly.  

I've never run across such in Adobe products, but maybe I haven't looked.  

For both this Cap-X problem, the dramatic slowdowns (I had it actually hang last night while just moving photos around and updating titles and captions), or the camera tether problem -- anything one can turn on and monitor to see what is going amok (or to collect data for Adobe to do so)?

If so, would love to do so, and file appropriate bug reports.


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## clee01l (Apr 26, 2015)

Jim Wilde said:


> I agree, but unless you have a reproducible issue, how are they supposed to fix it?
> 
> BTW, not sure if plug-ins also write into the prefs.


Maybe not directly, but Plugins that are Publish Services do have extensive entries in the Preferences file.  So, there is something in the plug-in API that facilitates this.


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## DVB (May 3, 2015)

*Use Caps Lock instead of Shift*



Ferguson said:


> Wondering if anyone else is seeing this.  I use the cap X key to reject and advance to the next image a lot.  It works even in Develop even in crop mode (where lower x is rotate aspect).
> 
> Except in LR 6, especially after running a while, it stops working.  Exit LR, start over, it works again.




Using Caps Lock in place of Shift works fine, at least for me.  For now, it seems like a reasonable workaround.


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## Linwood Ferguson (May 3, 2015)

Thanks.  The distressing thing seems to be that it is limited to a very few people, so I suspect it will be low on Adobe's priorities.  I haven't entered a bug as I have no useful pattern of how to reproduce it -- but it happens continuously.  I've had a few other keys that stop working as well, and every one comes back on a restart.


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## Jim Wilde (May 4, 2015)

I wouldn't worry about bugging it....it's been reported at the official feedback site several times, so Adobe should have already seen it. I've not been able to reproduce it, but I'm not a power user and maybe it's a resource intensive thing.


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