Crashes if external drive with offline images not connected

[wjdother]

I am in my second day of evaluating the trial version. I had previously looked at darktable but I want to be able to store images offline and AfterShot Pro 3 seemed to promise that. However, I placed two folders of .jpg images on an external USB 3.0 drive (Western Digital WD20NPVZ in an Oyen Digital Minipro USB 3.0 housing), and imported the images to AfterShot Pro 3. As long as the drive is connected I can see images and thumbnails, and select other images by clicking their thumbnails. If I start the program with the drive offline, I see only the thumbnails, which is not necessarily a problem. But clicking a thumbnail to select an image for viewing in the preview panel immediately crashes the program. This is not what I would expect from "offline" storage; shouldn't the program ask that the pertinent drive be connected (i.e., "Please connect the drive containing the folder <foldername>") rather than just stopping. This occurs running the program on Debian Linux 8.2 Jessie. FYI the program also crashes on the same (dual-boot) machine under Windows 7, but first the preview panel dispays a text message that the image is not available and then a Windows dialog box advises that the program "has stopped working" and Windows "will check for a fix" before stopping completely.

I really want to like this program and use it. However, with its present behavior it does not really support "offline" image storage. Is there any workaround for this, and more importantly, any hope the problem will be corrected?