Stability issues - new versions of Photodemon crashing more often than ever

[tannerhelland]

Discussed in #638

Originally posted by wickedtef February 14, 2025

I've been a long time user of PhotoDemon. My main reason for using it is when dealing with multiple files at high resolution. This is where PhotoDemon adds value compared to many other simplistic free/cheap alternatives. However, I've noticed that my "success" rate (i.e. working on some photos and then getting to a good quality exported photo) has gone down from about 70% some years ago now to 50%. Yes, you read that right - about half of the time I'm unable to make it to the end without a crash. The thing I find most frustrating is that crashes seem present throughout the software - many of the built-in tools can throw up crashes, but also operations like saving a file, either native pdi format or known formats like png or jpg. The autosave files are usually no good either, unfortunately.

The reason I'm writing this message today is because I've saved an evening of work editing some photos together into a collage, saving it three times as different pdi files and even bmp, every single one of them cannot be opened again. There is something seriously wrong in that PhotoDemon apparently does not detect it is writing garbage to file that it then cannot reopen again. Before that it crashed twice this morning, once when I tried to fill a selection with colour using the paint bucket, the other one just randomly as I was trying to select a photo.

I'm at a point where I'm starting to lose faith in PhotoDemon because of the high failure rate. Please don't let this discourage you - this is simply a request to focus development work on stability for the next period(s) and pause work on new features until stability has improved.

[tannerhelland]

Hello @wickedtef . Thank you for describing your experiences. I'm so very sorry about the challenges you've had with PhotoDemon. I am grateful that you took the time to reach out, because I would never want to ship software that behaves how you've described.

I have opened a dedicated issue for your report at this link. What I need next is some idea of where to begin my investigation.

Can I ask you to attach any debug logs from PhotoDemon's Data/Debug subfolder to this issue? (GitHub may ask you to zip them up first; if you need any help doing that, please let me know.) If I can get my hands on those debug logs, I'll have a much better place to start.

If you do not see any debug logs in that folder, we can switch you to a current nightly build which will produce those logs on every session.

I have had not any reports of stability issues from other users, so there may be something unique to your PC or Windows setup that can help me narrow down a cause. (For example, as a 32-bit app, PhotoDemon is very sensitive to memory pressure or limited hard drive space beyond its control - debug logs are a huge help in pinpointing system-specific issues like that.)

I know how frustrating software issues can be and I would never ask a user to stick with PhotoDemon after one crash, let alone constant recurring ones. I know your time is precious and any further help you can provide is a big ask, I know.

That said, thank you in advance for any further help you can provide. I'd love to get this sorted out ASAP if I can. 🙏