How to force album date to use EXIF date of last image?

dn3

I've been banging my head off this, and have searched the forum repeatedly. I have it set to use last image date as album date on the index, but it shows the uploaded date rather than the EXIF date. I haven't figured out how to fix this yet. The EXIF data exists on all images, and shows the date correctly when viewing an individual image.

If this is a bug rather than a missed setting on my part, could someone point me to the function I need to tweak to use the EXIF date please?

Temporary link is http://x29.org/ and you can see there that all the album dates show as yesterday, when I uploaded the last image to them. The actual EXIF dates of those images range from June to August of this year.

Using 1.4.1.2 with zpMasonry 1.4.1.

Thanks!

sbillard

If you have set this option after the images have already been discovered you will need to refresh the metadata. Zenphoto makes the (not unreasonable) assumption that it needs only see if newly discovered images have a later date than the album.

dn3

Thanks for the quick response. Yes, I did refresh the metadata, as well as rechecking settings, repeatedly.

Any other ideas?

sbillard

What is the actual date being shown? If it is a newer one than the images it will not be overridden.

dn3

OK, so the fix was simply to backdate the album creation date to be older than the images. Where is this documented? It really needs to say right beside this:

`
Details for use latest image date as album date

If you wish your album date to reflect the date of the latest image uploaded set this option. Otherwise the date will be set initially to the date the album was created.
`
Something to the effect of:

`If albums are newer than images in them, this setting has no effect!`

Two days of searching for a non-existent bug, merely bad design. So frustrating.

kagutsuchi

Instead of calling it "bad design", wouldn't it be more constructive to discuss the issue further or submit a ticket? There may be a reason for the current functionality, or perhaps it is indeed a bug.

Zenphoto is open-source and run by volunteers, so while I understand your frustration, nothing good comes out of such a comment. Contributions are far more helpful, invite help more readily, and keep the discussion civil.

dn3

I'm writing a bug list of problems I've encountered while trying to get this up and running smoothly. Assuming I don't get fed up enough to run back to what I was using before, I'll be happy to share that list in the hopes of some improvements coming.

I feel my frustration above is more than justified though. The interface leads you to believe that it functions one way, when in fact it totally ignores the setting under pretty common conditions. We spent two days delving 4 classes deep searching for why albums weren't pulling the EXIF date but individual images were. A lot of wasted time on the wrong track, but it was logical at the time, because who would think the feature would have been written this way?

dn3

Alright, here are a few more issues, as promised. I don't have time to go filing bug reports for each of these (and there are more too, but I need to clarify them before posting). So, do with this what you will, but they're all reproduce-able problems on my install.

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Adding a tag on the frontend, or when editing images, the CaSe is not preserved and the tag is saved as lowercase.

Renaming tags preserves CaSe.

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Editing News date: can't add the time, field is uneditable except by clicking a date on the little calendar applet.

After saving the post, the time is set as 00:00:00 - and can then be edited.

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Gallery Stats do not work. I started with about 8 albums, now have about 12 including a couple dynamic ones, and the stats have reported only one album the entire time.

Refreshing metadata or database has no effect.

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Duplicate images are a real problem. For example, if you unwittingly move an image between categories, where that filename already exists, it will throw an "image already exists" error but keep both database entries. Then if you delete either one, it deletes both records plus the only copy remaining copy of the image file!

acrylian

As my collegue said, bug reports please as tickets as on the forum they tend to get forgotten. We have not always time to look into them at once or within a days, especially as my collegue is currently only available part-time. And do not mix tickets issues, one ticket for each issue.

1. I can reproduce that. Btw. we consider the front end editing really insecure and therefore maybe will not fix that part. Anyway, please open a ticket.

2. I can't reproduce this. So standard questions: What browser, any errors (JS or else)?

3. I can't reproduce this either.

4. Zenphoto is filesystem based so it will update itself, especially if you use the "database refresh" utility on the admin overview page.
I had not time to try to reproduce the unwanted image deletion yet. Please open a ticket for this as well.