Missing Albums - all of them!

Adrian0832

Another weird one...

Site has run fine on 1.6.1a for ages - upgrade to 1.6.2 (noting advice not to "jump" versions) and then to 1.6.3. The next step would be to 1.6.4 but, before that, I notice that the "Albums" admin page is empty (although the albums, and images, are visible in the Gallery)

Further checking shows that if I select "Show Thumbnail stand-in" (on the albums admin page) I get the folder hierarchy (and can browse down it), but no images. If I choose "show album thumb" the Albums page is blank.

Nothing obvious in any log file.

acrylian

noting advice not to "jump" versions)

The advice appear always but is primarily meant for bigger version jumps. Smaller jumps like 1.6.1 to 1.6.3 should actually not be a real problem. But depending on customisations or third party tools used I would always recommend to read the release notes about any changes that might affect things. Sometimes small changes can cause a cascade of problems.

But to the problem. That's is a weird one and if there is no actual error in any logs. But if you can see albums and images on the front end this probably will help:

Try the database refresh utility on the overview page. Sometimes the file system and the database get out of sync and need such a refresher. It does thit automatically in the background but on larger sites it may not always catch everything at once (simply put).

Adrian0832

Database Refresh seems to get locked up. Enters a loop of "well that didn't work, trying again" which terminates after about a dozen attempts, presumably to prevent getting locked in a cycle you can never escape from.

I've tried adding a new "new" album on the off chance there was something wrong with the imported and updated one's. Same result.

I'm going to try installing a second ZenPhoto instance (with a different DB Prefix), see if that works. If it does, I'll give some thought to copying the data across (at least I'm getting plenty of practice in migration...)

acrylian

There are no errors in the logs regarding that? Is this a very large site, e.g. lots of albums and images?

Did you check the file/folder permissions? Perhaps these got set wrong. Setupt tries to do it right but some servers are configured differently so it may set to strict permission which then cause all sorts of follow up issues.
https://www.zenphoto.org/news/permissions-for-zenphoto-files-and-folders/

I'm going to try installing a second ZenPhoto instance (with a different DB Prefix), see if that works. If it does, I'll give some thought to copying the data across (at least I'm getting plenty of practice in migration...)

Folllow our moving installs instructions as the order of things is important to not loose data entered manually becasue the file system is the base and not that database.
https://www.zenphoto.org/news/moving-and-changing-existing-installations/

Adrian0832

I'll check the folder and file permissions - thanks.

As a first go, I'll set up a second instance with just a few images and one sub-album to see if it's OK.

The main site has not that many albums but around 17,000 images

acrylian

Ok, 17,000 is a lot to process. Might be too much for the server to process somehow, especially on the database refresh. That might need more than one attempt…

You could perhaps try pre-caching via the cacheManager as that also sort of re-scans the images and therefore albums. But of course that will take quite a while.

Still I don't understand why this happened on just an upgrade.

Adrian0832

It may have been more than just the upgrade - I moved to a new host, same version of PHP, ZP and BootStrap. Then (on the new host) went PHP 7.4 to 8.3. Then ZP 1.6.1a to 1.6.2 to 1.6.3. At each step I tested to see if all was well (as both user and admin) but may not have actually visited the albums/admin page (I know I tested as a user and checked admin/overview but certainly didn't check every admin function each time).

I've just built (yet another) instance, 1.6.3 and (as expected) works perfectly. 150 images, one dynamic album and one static - all is well. Only thing (which I must have forgotten I'd done previously) was copy /zp-core/zp-extensions/mobileTheme/Mobile_Detect.php which BootStrap requires

acrylian

Okay, as long as you followed the order as described because of the filesystem base that sounds all as should. The core functionality regarding the gallery/albums part has not been changed.

Sound as if you noticed but use our fork of the zpBootstrap theme which at least on request try to keep at least working as the original author is not active anymore.

Perhaps indeed some detail got lost. But glad you could work it out in the end! Thanks for the follow up.