Repeated crashing of GRAMPS

Help
1

I have been using GRAMPS for about 3 years now and am using version 6.0.6 on a Windows 11 HP laptop. I have about 13,000 names in the database and have been linking photos and documents to individuals via a Media folder that now has over 6,000 photos/documents in the folder. Recently GRAMPS has repeatedly been crashing when I use it, most often when I try to add a new photo/document to a person’s Gallery. Is this happening due to too many files in the media folder? If so, is there a way to create multiple smaller media folders while still maintaining the links to individuals already created? Is there some other cause of the program crashing?

2

I ran into some timeout problems generating thumbnails for big Media files. (In my case, it was Evince having problems dealing with a big PDF.)

I wonder if there is a way to disable thumbnailing? Just to eliminate that as the problem.

Your set of gramplets in the various splitbars might also overload Gramps. Try shuffling all the *_bottombar.ini and *_sidebar.ini files into a holding folder as a temporary diagnostic.

3

Without additional information, one can only speculate as to the cause. Is Gramps throwing an unhandled exception, i.e. does a window pop-up with a call stack? If yes, please open a bug report with that stack, and steps that led to that exception (you’ve identified adding a new photo/document as a trigger).

A “hard crash” would be one where Gramps application simply disappears and crashed to the desktop. Which is happening for you?

It might also be helpful to know whether theses crashes started occurring after an upgrade to 6.0.6, or whether they were occurring previously.

As a check, you might try opening the Gramps sample family tree or another family tree and experiment with adding images/documents there to see if it you can reproduce the issue there to see if you can isolate the issue to that specific family tree.

Let us know what you find.

4

You could try disabling the thumbnailer plugins in the Plugin Manager.

Alternatively, running the ThumbnailGenerator addon to create all the thumbnails in advance might be useful.

5

It seems that the crashes started after upgrading to GRAMPS 6.0.6. Initially the crashes were infrequent and I really did not connect them to trying to link media files. Now the crashes occur almost every time I try to link a photo or document to a person. They are hard crashes; there is no error message or warning. The program simply disappears and I have to break the lock to restart. It seems that I can do the other functions like adding people, editing, etc. when using the program without crashing it.

6

@namhel77 This seems like a good and conservative troubleshooting step.

7

To better understand your process… When adding the media record to Gramps do you:

  1. Add the media object using the add option in the person’s, event’s, etc Gallery tab.
  2. Add the media object to the Media navigation list using the Add Media option for the list.
  3. Do you drag-n-drop the media object from the Windows File Manager window directly into either the Gallery tab or Media navigation list.

Gramps only adds the path information in the media record pointing to the raw file stored on the hard drive. I currently have 31K media records with no issues.

But that raises another question…

Where do you store your raw media files? Hard drive, cloud storage, other location?

8

I am using the person or event’s Gallery tab and clicking the add option. All the photos and documents are stored in a folder entitled “Media” on my hard drive.

9

I uninstalled the Thumbnails plug-in and restarted GRAMPS. The program is still crashing when I try to link media to a person or event.

10

by hard crash, do you mean that all Gramps windows disappear?

If yes, Gramps may be being killed by Windows. Note the time of the crash and then use the Windows “Event Viewer” to see if you can locate any events that mention gramps. If so, please copy the event info here.

11

And if Gramps is crashing (but Windows is surviving the crash) then starting Gramps from the Command Line (not the Gramps Console icon) with give some crash feedback in the CLI window.

(If you start from the Gramps Console icon, then the console goes away when the application dies.)

12

Here is the report from the Windows event log following the latest crash:

Log Name: Application
Source: Application Error
Date: 2/15/2026 1:03:08 PM
Event ID: 1000
Task Category: Application Crashing Events
Level: Error
Keywords:
User: LAPTOP-4LO6OM5\Jim
Computer: Laptop-4LO6OM5
Description:
Faulting application name: grampsw.exe, version: 6.0.6.0, time stamp: 0x68ce452d
Faulting module name: libintl-8.dll, version: 0.26.0.0, time stamp: 0x68e10ed7
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000008a80
Faulting process id: 0x5498
Faulting application start time: 0x1DC9EB5610753FC
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\GrampsAIO64-6.0.6\grampsw.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\GrampsAIO64-6.0.6\lib\libintl-8.dll
Report Id: 0c9898b8-3faf-4141-a9a6-2253ede95fb4
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:
Event Xml:

1000
0
2
100
0
0x8000000000000000

192473

Application
Laptop-4LO6OM5

grampsw.exe
6.0.6.0
68ce452d
libintl-8.dll
0.26.0.0
68e10ed7
c0000005
0000000000008a80
0x5498
0x1dc9eb5610753fc
C:\Program Files\GrampsAIO64-6.0.6\grampsw.exe
C:\Program Files\GrampsAIO64-6.0.6\lib\libintl-8.dll
0c9898b8-3faf-4141-a9a6-2253ede95fb4

13

looks like handling of international characters. have you made any change in your file naming, to include names in other languages? (which should be perfectly OK)

14

I’ve got a couple person names where I have used ö or an ñ but for the most part, I have very few names or places in a foreign language. I have changed the way I have been naming media files, using the underscore character much more frequently between first and last names or between last names to make it easier to search for files in the media folder.

15

did you happen to notice if all the crash events happened in the same library: libintl-8.dll?

is it true that yours Gramps user interface is in English, or is it some other language?

so far, I can’t reproduce this problem.

16

Log Name: Application
Source: .NET Runtime
Date: 2/15/2026 11:48:37 AM
Event ID: 1022
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: Laptop-4LO6OM5
Description:
.NET Runtime version 4.0.30319.0 - There was a failure initializing profiling API attach infrastructure. This process will not allow a profiler to attach. HRESULT: 0x80004005. Process ID (decimal): 25388. Message ID: [0x2509].
Event Xml:

1022
0
2
0
0
0x80000000000000

191527

Application
Laptop-4LO6OM5

.NET Runtime version 4.0.30319.0 - There was a failure initializing profiling API attach infrastructure. This process will not allow a profiler to attach. HRESULT: 0x80004005. Process ID (decimal): 25388. Message ID: [0x2509].

Log Name: Application
Source: MsiInstaller
Date: 2/15/2026 5:00:38 AM
Event ID: 11706
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: LAPTOP-4LO6OM5\Jim
Computer: Laptop-4LO6OM5
Description:
Product: PowerENGAGE – Error 1706. An installation package for the product PowerENGAGE cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package ‘PowerENGAGE-3.2.16.msi’.
Event Xml:

11706
0
2
0
0
0x80000000000000

186402

Application
Laptop-4LO6OM5

Product: PowerENGAGE – Error 1706. An installation package for the product PowerENGAGE cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package ‘PowerENGAGE-3.2.16.msi’.
(NULL)
(NULL)
(NULL)
(NULL)
(NULL)
7B34303041303142462D453930382D343339332D424433392D3331453338363337374244417D

I went back through the error messages in the Event Viewer. Most of them had to do with library: libintl-8.dll

I found two different error messages in the same time frame as the library messages which I have copied above. I’m not sure if they were related to the GRAMPS crashes or not. My GRAMPS user interface is English.

17

it looks like all of the Exceptions related to Gramps happen in libintl-8.dll

I have tried to follow your steps with Gramps 6.0.6 on Win11, using file names with international characters and so far no problems.

for the files that cause the problem, are the file names long, like over 250 characters?

can you copy 1 of the file names here?

18

Here are a couple examples of the file names I use:

Alice_Czecha_Waterhouse_engagement.jpg

Anna Magdalena Lehman Rutschman gravesite2.jpeg

Arnold Riess military history.pdf

I don’t think I have actually used any international characters in my file names. The second example above is one of the longest file names I have used.

19

Thanks for the details.

You said all the files are in a Media folder.

Does the Media folder have sub-folders?

What is the path to the Media folder?

(e.g. “C:\Users\dave\Desktop\Media”)

20

You’re already debugging with others in this thread but to follow-up on this, can you tell us which version of Gramps you upgraded from? Given that Windows is recording crashes in libintl, I’d like to see if there was a change in that library.

Another experiment worth conducting is to add media to another new family tree, or the Gramps sample family tree to see if the crashes are application-wide, or family-tree related.