REMOVING DUPLICATE PROMO PICTURES

(Not a new feature, just instructions for solving a temporary problem.) Changes in the DAZ store made in the beginning of January 2022 have been affecting the program so that it has been downloading an extra duplicate set of promo pictures for each product since then. This was only discovered recently but a fix has now been made (version 1.016) so it again only downloads one set of promos, as it’s supposed to. Many of these duplicates differ from the originals in ways that makes it more or less impossible to automatically detect and remove them in a reliable way (different HASH). The only viable solution to ensure that they all are removed is therefore to delete all the product page data for purchases in 2022 and then re-download them. So here are the instructions for how to do that. Sorry for the inconvenience. Note that it is necessary that you are online when doing this so the program can access the DAZ store. Before deleting any offline product page data for a product the program scans the DAZ store to detect if the product’s product page data are still available for download. If that’s not the case, product page data for that product will not be deleted. This is to ensure that no unrecoverable offline data are being deleted - unless of course DAZ removes the product page before you manage to re-download the deleted data. Therefore you should re-download product page data for all your 2022 purchases immediately, after having deleted their offline data, just in case. In any case, it’s highly recommended to backup the Product Data folder regularly, so that you can restore any product data no longer available, if for some reason you should lose them. 1. uncheck the Enable Data Check box on the main window to avoid any disturbing windows popping up during the process. 2. under Search, select Order Date, type 2022 in the search field, and click the Search button. You will now have all products listed that may be affected by the duplicate promo issue. 3. right click on the product list and select Check All to checkmark all products. 4. right click on the product list and select Add Checked Products to ‘Manage Product Data’ List from the Context menu. 5. from the Tools menu select Manage Product Data. The Product Data Manager should now open with all the selected products listed and checkmarked. 6. in the Select Product Data to Delete box first check the Product Page Data and then the Product Page Pictures boxes (the last box can’t be checked unless the first one is checked). 7. click the Delete Selected Data button to start deleting the data. The process may take a while, partly because of the online data check which may be slow or fast, depending on the current load on the server. When finished, check the list to see if there are any product that haven’t been deleted because of missing pages in the store. Status for these products looks like this: Write down the SKUs for these products as you will have to manually delete any duplicate promos they may have. 8. close the Product Data Manager window to get back to the main window. Make sure that all products listed there are still checkmarked, then right click on the list and select Add Checked Products to ‘Download’ List from the Context menu. 9. from the Tools menu select Download Product Data and log in. In the Download Manager ensure only Get Product Pages is checked to speed up download, and click Start Download to re-download all the deleted product page data.

Many products include promo pictures like small 110 px/w icons and other irrelevant pictures you may want to remove. The icons are generally but not always copies of existing promos; when Resize Pictures is checked with 300 px/w they look the same as the original but blurred: Other general types of unwanted pictures there may be are exact duplicates with different file names, and blank pictures cluttering the program’s promo picture viewer. Some pictures also have wrong file extensions so they won’t be displayed in the promo picture browser. To fix these things a new feature Clean Up Promo Pictures has been added: The default settings should remove all standard icons, all exact duplicates, most other unwanted pictures, plus fix wrong file extensions, without removing anything of importance. You can adjust the settings as you like, or re-run the process with higher settings, if needed. In any case, use at your own risk. It’s pretty slow as it does a lot of checking for each file, so if you have many products you may want to fix them one year at a time, so you don’t have to start all over from the beginning if you select them all and then cancel at some point to continue later. You can however select whichever products you want to clean up, even a single one. Just checkmark those you want to include and proceed from 3. below. 1. from the main window under Search, select Order Date, type year (e.g. 2012) in the search field, and click the Search button, to list all products from that year. 2. right click on the product list and select Check All to checkmark all products. 3. right click on the product list and select Add Checked Products to ‘Manage Product Data’ List from the Context menu. 4. from the Tools menu select Manage Product Data. The Product Data Manager should now open with all the selected products listed and checkmarked. 5. click the Clean Up Promo Pictures button to open the Clean Up tool. 6. if you want to copy deleted files to a folder instead of deleting them, so you can inspect and maybe restore some before deleting them completely, select a folder to copy them to and then check the Copy deleted files to: box. The deleted files will be organized in the same way as in the Product Data folder, in subfolders named by the product SKU. For files with wrong file extensions a copy with correct extension will be created in the original folder and the original file will be moved to the folder with deleted files. 7. click the Start button to start the clean up process.

CLEAN UP PROMO PICTURES (NEW FEATURE)

Use this feature if you want to inspect and manage the deleted files, e.g. to see what may have been deleted if you have used altered settings for deletion. Click the Inspect Deleted Files button to open the inspection window. Pictures may load very slowly depending on their size and display size settings. Wait until all pictures have loaded before browsing to next product and don’t change/toggle the controls too fast, or you may get blank pages (browser quirk). If that happens, click on the file SKU, toggle the View Retained Files box, or change the Resize Pictures value. Retained Files are the promo pictures left after deletion of unwanted files. Using the Context menus you can open the folders in File Explorer and manually delete more unwanted files if any left, or restore deleted files, using copy/paste or drag/drop. You can also drag/drop (copy only, not move) pictures from the browser windows to folders in File Explorer, except for pictures with wrong file extension. The Default button will reset the Resize Pictures value to 150 px/w.

Below is shown the deleted/fixed file types you may encounter and how they look in the browsers. Pictures with wrong file extensions can be opened with IrfanView if you want to inspect them.

INSPECTING THE DELETED FILES