Clips in Favorites Disappear ???

[BuckSkin]

Lately, my clips saved as favorites have been disappearing; I am losing as many as four or five clips each day.

I have studied the preferences settings and can find no option to prevent this.

I did find some of my missing clips in "Old Clips", still marked as favorites, but I could not figure out how to move them back to display in the favorites menu.

What am I missing and what am I doing wrong ?

Thanks for reading and all help is appreciated.

[mouser]

I hope I can help answer this -- much of the confusion has to do with the fact that CHS really has TWO different ways to mark clips as "favorites", and I probably should have picked a different term for one of those ways.

• The first way, is that each clip has a field (column) that can be checked to indicate that the clip is a "Favorite".  But a better term might have been "protect" or "preserve".  When you check this field, CHS should never delete the clip as part of its automatic pruning of old clips.  This automatic filing/pruning of clips can be configured in various ways on the "Backup/Maintenance" tab.  Personally I recommend people leave on the option that moves new clips to the old group and similar, as it keeps CHS really running smoothly if there are not thousands of clips in the New group.
• The second way to mark a clip as a favorite is to drag and drop it into the "My Favorites" group(folder).  This will ALSO protect it from automatic filing, but has a second effect, which is that the clip is shown in the MyFavorites right-click context menu.

SO, I think the best answer to your question is that you should drag clips you want to appear in your favorites menu from whatever group they are in, into the MyFavorites group.  Just click and hold and drag and drop into MyFavorites.

You could also try disabling the Automatic Filing options on the Backup/Maintenance tab.

Let me know if that helps!


EDIT: Now that I think about it, I'm thinking I made both ways of marking a clip as a favorite have the same effects on a clip -- to protect it AND show it on favorites menu.  So just two different ways to do the same thing.  So you can either move a clip to the MyFavorites group, OR leave it wherever you want and set the "Favorite" flag for it.

[IainB]

@mouser: Where you write:

Personally I recommend people leave on the option that moves new clips to the old group and similar, as it keeps CHS really running smoothly if there are not thousands of clips in the New group.

- could you elaborate on the emphasised bit please? I'm not sure that I understand/appreciate all the implications of what you say there. (Thanks.)

[mouser]

CHS uses a database to store the clips.  As such, it should be quite fast in sorting, filtering, displaying, navigating, searching, large number of clips.

The speed/memory of your pc will determine how large the database of clips can get before you might notice it taking a longer than usual time to do these operations.  Whether that happens at a thousand clips or a hundred thousand, at some point you would eventually feel the slowdown associated with having a huge database of clips.

So one way to combat that is to let CHS automatically move clips into an Old clip group that you never go into, keeping the number of the clips that you normally peruse in your New group more manageable.  Letting CHS actually purge very old clips would improve speed even more.

Bottom line -- if you're not troubled by the speed of your clip management in CHS, don't worry about it.  But if you ever do experience performance issues and huge have huge numbers of clips that you never need, consider getting rid of old clips, either using CHS automatic pruning functions, or manually.

[IainB]

@mouser: ^^ OIC. Thankyou. I was a bit worried there that I might be misusing CHS, if I wanted optimum efficiency (and I do want that).
As regards efficiency:
The way I use CHS, I actually don't often need to peruse the "New" group. Rather than use the Quick Paste Menu, I rely on scrolling through or searching for clips in a full-screen view of the 3 panes of the CHS GUI:

• the narrow Tree pane on the left, and
• the Grid pane on the right, with
• the Memo pane below it.

(Each of the latter two occupy roughly half of the screen depth, immediately to the right of the Tree pane.)

A lot of text that I save is contained in text tabs of relevant/related images, which enables me to quickly see any text that is relevant to saved image clips.

I also disable automatic purging/deleting of older clips, preferring to manually periodically inspect and delete old surplus/unwanted clips.
This works well for me (after the modifications to CHS you made, per a separate thread), and CHS still seems to be blazingly fast, even as I accumulate more and more clips. The only thing that occasionally seems to momentarily slow CHS down nowadays is if I inadvertently save a humungously large image file (clip), where I guess the sudden resource demands required by CHS to display the image in the Memo pane are the cause of the momentary delay (the fix for which is to resize/reduce the saved image/file, which can be done in a trice, using irfanview as the defined external image viewer for CHS).