Hi,

I'm using a very old version of ZenPhoto, version 1.2.1. I want to upgrade to the latest version. I am fine with going version by version but PHP has not been playing nice with me. That said, I decided to install a separate ZenPhoto, version 1.4.7. All I actually need are my album names, since I have many thousands. I don't care about tags, or anything like that. Is there anyway to import just zp_albums from the 1.2.1 database into the new 1.4.7 database without causing errors? Then I can just move the album folders over to the new install.

Thank you.

The recommended way is to update step by step, although I personally did direct updates from old versions, too. But that may not always work.

Since Zenphoto's albums are file system based, you can always just move the albums folder as long as you don't care about database info you may have entered later on.

If you do, you will also need to import the images table with the albums table. But this kind of separate update has not been tested since the database table saw changes over the years, too.

Btw, here you have a good reason why frequent updates are a good idea ;-)

I'm going to give the 'albums' and 'images' import a go. Should I set anything custom when exporting them from my 1.2.1 database?

Not that I do remember offhand.

If you have a simple gallery Zenphoto site without any specific extras used you could still try a direct update. Running setup is required in any case and that will update the tables to the current version, no matter if you imported them or just used the existing one. Which is basically the part that has not been tested specifially.

That did work for me on the sites I tried but it may also fail. But having a database backup in case it fails is of course mandatory if you need to re-setup the old site.

Well, I tried updating from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2 and even that gave me problems. I'm no expert, but I think it's because I'm running newer PHP software, as I kept getting "Non-static method utf8::convert() should not be called statically," both during the setup upgrade and on the actual page. It basically broke the gallery with just those messages repeated. And I think I once tried updating to the latest version, but that broke, too.

I'll try this albums and images import now and report my results.

Yes, such things may happen. But I was refering to try an direct update from 1.2.1 to the latest 1.4.12. I did successfully update at least one very old 1.0.8 install directly to 1.4.something sometime ago. But again this may or may not work.

Looking forward to your results and hope it works out.

Oh, that's what I was saying. I'm pretty sure I did try a direct upgrade to the newest version once, but it didn't work out.

So I imported the two tables (I had to add drop statements in the custom settings, phpMyAdmin was giving me errors on the upload otherwise), and copied over a single folder (with a sub-folder, and a set of five images in that sub-folder) from the albums folder into my new version test install. While the album names and description and such seem to be in tact, I get this error:

http://i.imgur.com/8fYz1JR.jpg

Not sure what to do from here. =/

If we're not able to resolve this, can I enlist you for some paid support, Acrylian?

The error means that there is the column "watermark_thumb" missing. You should try is to add that column to the table via phpMyAdmin.

Is that the new name for what was the "thumb" column in 1.2.1. If so, I can just rename it, no?

Edit: Tried changing the name. The errors are gone, but all the images are broken.

No, thumb still exists as well, watermark_thumb is something different. You need to add that missing column. Should be varchar(255).

Anyway, after importing you should in any case run the setup script. That also should update the old tables.

No. The "thumb" column still exists. Try adding a new column with the name "watermark_thumb".

Running the reinstall seemed to do the trick! Thanks, man!

Now to begin reworking my theme. wahh