I maintain my photography business in Panorama. However photography’s not my day job. I keep all my work on my photography PanoDB in my OneDrive Folder on my personal MacBook.
With the new license model I can now load Pano X on my Work Macbook as well since I’m sharing my license usage across both MacBooks. However, when I look in the OneDrive folder on my work MacBook what I see instead of the single .pandb file is a folder containing what I imagine are the internal components:
I can’t open any of these individually in Panorama X, nor can I “open the folder” except to expose this list of components.
Is this some bizarre anomaly I can correct or is it some limitation of the .pandb file structure that I can’t overcome?
Somehow your Panorama bundle got unblessed and turned into a standard folder when you transferred it over. You can turn it back into the original format with two steps:
Add or change the existing name extension to .bundle and then hit the “Use .bundle” button when asked.
Now change the .bundle extension to .pandb and hit the “Use .pandb” button.
Your file should now be a standard Panorama X database file ready for use.
An additional thought would be to always transfer you files between computers using zip files so they can be uncompressed after going through the cloud and not get inadvertently altered.
Gary,
Thanks! Your first suggestion doesn’t seem to have worked. I’m not actually
actively “transferring” the file from computer to computer. By saving it in
my OneDrive folder on my home Mac, MS is replicating the file to a cloud
folder. When I browse that folder from my work Mac, I see the unbundled
folder version. Changing the extension to .bundl and back on my home Mac
hasn’t had any impact on what I observe when I look in the OneDrive folder
via the browser on my work Mac.
Zipping the file first did work, but it forces me to unzip and download the
resulting file, meaning that whatever I do at work isn’t seamlessly
synchronized to my home version - I have to transport it back somehow. Not
the end of the world but not the way, say, an Excel document remains
synched across 2 laptops via OneDrive.
Thanks again for your suggestions.
Adam
This sounds like a rather serious bug in OneDrive. There are lots of macOS applications that use bundles just as Panorama X does. It sounds like OneDrive doesn’t work with bundles (which is a standard macOS feature, and has been since the first version of OS X).
I can tell you the DropBox works fine with bundles, as does iCloud Drive. You’ve just given me another reason to avoid OneDrive.
Thanks. I used to be pretty set on DropBox but Microsoft gives each member of my family 1TB of storage included in a 5-pack of the full Office suite (they’re all on Windows) for $100 and this is the first problem I’ve run into. I’ll try on Dropbox or iCloud - smaller space allocations but shouldn’t be a problem.
Actually, just tried Dropbox and had the same result- the file in my Dropbox folder on my home laptop appears as an unbundled folder when I browse Dropbox from my work laptop.
I’ve been doing it for 3 or 4 years. So perhaps there is something else wrong that is specific to Adam’s system, I suppose the problem could be on either his home or work computer, but either way, I’ve never heard of it before.
I think the issue may be that I’m browsing to the file, not syncing it with Dropbox or OneDrive apps. I’m trying to access a personal file on my work computer in Pano’s RAM without actually maintaining it on the hard drive of my company’s laptop.
It’s not possible on my work machine because it doesn’t appear there as a file name with extension but as a folder. As mentioned, I think this is because I’m navigating to OneDrive and DropBox via browser to their sites and not by syncing the OneDrive or DropBox content on my work machine. I think I will just have to make a compromise with my attempt to keep the 2 machines unsynced while still accessing the file across both.
Given that, I don’t understand what you want to do with the file. You won’t be able to open the database in Panorama X unless the file content is synced to the local drive.
If it was an Excel file, for instance, that I kept in the OneDrive folder on my home Mac, I could navigate to it in OneDrive via the browser on my work Mac. If I double-clicked on the Excel file in the OneDrive file list displayed in my browser it would open in my browser in Excel 365, I’d click the “Edit in Excel” and it would open the file in Excel, I could make edits which would be saved to the cloud version of my file and then replicated to my home Mac when next I was online. It would do all this without making a copy of the file on my local (work) drive. Thus, while I would be able to access and edit it from work, I wouldn’t be storing it at work or, strictly speaking, be syncing my company’s laptop to my personal one over a public cloud. That’s what I was hoping to be able to do with my Pano file. I realize this is kind of a neat distinction which may not be terribly meaningful to anyone but me (I hope I haven’t wasted too many people’s time on something that turns out not to be feasible or terribly popular).
Having investigated this further, I can’t say I’m surprised that Pano doesn’t offer capabilities that look like they may be proprietary to the Microsoft suite so I’ll just find a work around or maybe just setup Dropbox so it does fully sync across both machines but be parsimonious about the personal files I allow to replicate on my work machine.
I have been having trouble with saving my .pandb files since utilizing cloud services for synchronization between different devices. I receive the Panorama error: The document “xxx.pandb” could not be saved. The file has been changed by another application.. This does not occur within a few seconds of saving but does once OneDrive has a chance to synch the files to the cloud. The choices in the error message are “Save Anyway”, “Revert”, or “Save As…” It seems Panorama doesn’t know how to deal with cloud synchronization. This error message occasionally gets lost behind another window and seemingly freezes Panorama because I cannot see the error message behind other windows and I start clicking on options until Panorama gives me a spinning wheel of death.
If you want to use a database across multiple computers, the solution is to use Panorama X Server. Cloud synchronization is not suitable for database applications.
If your intent is to just have access to the same files on two different computers then I can report that using Apple’s iCloud service has worked fine for me. Of course the key is that you have to make sure that you close your files on the one computer before trying to open them on the other. A couple of times I have had to call home to my wife from the office and ask her to quit out of Panorama before opening them on my office computer.
I would agree with Jim Rea that this is not a viable solution for sharing a database with others because you can’t control who has it open and when synchronization has occurred.
