No thumbnails being displayed suddenly

Aegist

Hi Guys,
I have been running my gallery for about 3 months now, and suddenly a couple of days ago (after no change at all - not even new photos uploaded) all of the thumbnails stop showing in my album. If you follow the links all thr way through to the full size image, it still appears, but the album thumbnails, the thumbnails for each image, and the images which fit to the screen size all don't show at all.

If you copy the image location and paste it to a new window you get this message:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 12288 bytes) in /home/tdmskpc/public_html/zenphoto/zp-core/functions-image.php on line 59

First thing I did when this started happening was to upgrade it. Interestingly, I think the line that the error message refers to has changed now that I have upgraded it (and I don't just mean the number, I mean the coding on the line.)

Currently line 59 (and 60) is:
error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);
$_zp_error = false;

Before the upgrade the line it pointed me at was something to do with the CreateImage function.... (which makes sense)

Anyway, obviously upgrading hasn't fixed the problem, and I can't figure out what else to do. The most bizzare thing is that it was all working fine - all of the images were cached and displaying one night, then nothing the next morning. The images should all still be in the cache, so I don't understand why it should still need to create the image, shouldn't it just call upon the already created ones?

Anyway, please help if you can!

The gallery is here: http://www.tdmskp.com.au/zenphoto/

Thanks,
Shane

Aegist

Anyone?

jsumners

You need to provide some more detail. What does Apache's error log say when you try to load the thumbnails? Do you manage the software on the server? Or does a hosting provider?

sbillard

the fatal error memory size exhausted is usually caused by an overly large image. Maybe an image has got corrupted?

Aegist

I get no apache error. The message i provided is the only information I have.

A host manages the serves.

sbillard: I guess that means I should try deleting and rebuilding my albums one at a time then?
Although if I have to enter all of the info again (names, descriptions etc for each photo), that could be not worth the effort...

Aegist

OK, this is strange. Looking around a bit more I have found that a few of the thumbnails are indeed showing correctly - namely the images which are not taken by my main camera. Images that have been scanned, or taken by another camera.

Now some of these photos are larger than the ones not being shown, and some are smaller. So it isn't a file size thing (unless it is explicitly blocking images of a size around 1.5meg)

I just re uploaded some images to the server - no change in those ones (http://www.tdmskp.com.au/zenphoto/index.php?album=Various+Images so you can see. Four of the images are from my main camera, and the rest are old photos scanned in or taken with different cameras).

Remember, all of these photos were working fine and displaying thumbnails only a day or two ago. And if you follow the link all the way to the real image, the real image still displays.

It just has me stumped.

acrylian

zenphoto does not block any image size, but probably your server does. Please read here: http://www.zenphoto.org/2007/12/troubleshooting-zenphoto/#10
Maybe you could ask your ISP if he changed anything in the server configuration? If it worked before, that could be a cause.
There has been a forum thread about some camera models which pictures cause trouble, but I can't find it right now.

jsumners

Acrylian hit on what I suspect. It is entirely possible that your host has changed the PHP configuration without alerting you. You should speak with their service department about it; be sure to have the date that it changed ready to give to them.

sbillard

The camera which caused trouble was an Olympus. Some problem with the EXIF/IPTC data.

trisweb

This isn't the Olympus EXIF bug, it's simply the out-of-memory error.

`Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2304 bytes) in /home/tdmskpc/public_html/zenphoto/zp-core/functions-image.php on line 59`

The images you're uploading are 7MP (about 3000x2300px). That's simply too big for a web gallery to process.

It's complicated to explain, but the memory requirements are not based on the image file size, but the number of bits required to process the image as a *bitmap* in GD. So, they're based on the image dimensions, the pixel color depth, number of colors, lossless-compressibility of the image, and other factors. It's hard to tell exactly how large an image your server can handle with X memory limit (yours is 32MB), but you usually just have to resize them before uploading to fit within that.

You can go down to 1600x1200 or 1024x768 -- those should fit within that memory limit. Smaller images will also process faster, put less strain on the server, take up less space, and upload faster, which are all good side-effects.

Also, this is not only a Zenphoto issue - most web galleries will have this problem, as the image simply has to be held in memory to be processed. There's no way around it.

You can ask your host to increase the memory limit, but they probably lowered it because their servers were under too much load from doing things like processing large images, so they had to do something. It makes more sense for everyone if you just downsize the images.

Aegist

Great. Thanks so much for the help again guys. I will start batch resizing the images and uploading them - I'll get back to you if that does the job or not!

Thanks!
Shane

Aegist

I have converted a few images to a smaller resolution and they have worked. It'll take time converting the rest, but thanks once more for the help guys!