Quick question. I've been pondering moving hosts and consolidating as right now I'm using three different web-hosts for differing projects.

If I were to move the zenphoto install (complete site move, database backup via phpmyadmin then restoral etc) would I have to re-tag every photo, add descriptions, etc, all over again?

The filesystem would be different between the hosts one starts with /user/home etc and the other is /var/usr/home/blahblah/acct.

Is zenphoto's filesystem based setup comparative to it's relative location? Or the full path?

No, but you should use the database backup utility that Zenphoto provides on the overview page. In the nightly setup will be able to import that. The database must be there before you access images because being filesystem based means that Zenphoto uses the image it discovers on the file system. If there is an entry to that on the db it is used, if not created (the troubleshooting features a diagram).

The most secure way is to add the info to the images via metadata itself before intially uploading.

In any case, I suggest to run a test before moving the real thing.

Alright, I kind of figured it was something like that. I have the tags all inserted into the photo already, just don't want to lose the descriptions. I have the 11-9 nightly currently, should I grab the most recent one for the option to import at setup? Or is it already in that one?

That should already be there, but you also do that with the backup utility directly.

Ok, yeah I see. Attempting to restore just says "restore failed". It restores properly on the original database, but when attempting to do a restore on the new location it fails.

Is there logs or a debug switch I can enable to see what's going on? I don't see any errors in cgi log for it.

Edit:

Original Location -
# Zenphoto version 1.2.6 [4681] (Official Build)
# Current gallery theme: myzenpage_visual
# PHP version: 5.2.9
# Graphics support: PHP GD library bundled (2.0.34 compatible)
# PHP memory limit: 128M (Note: Your server might allocate less!)
# MySQL version: 5.0.83
# Database name: db1092904_zen
# Table prefix: zp_

New Location -
# Zenphoto version 1.2.6 [4681] (Official Build)
# Current gallery theme: myzenpage_visual
# PHP version: 5.1.6
# Graphics support: PHP GD library bundled (2.0.28 compatible)
# PHP memory limit: 128M (Note: Your server might allocate less!)
# MySQL version: 5.0.77
# Database name: zen
# Table prefix: zp_

I am sorry, I don't know because that's sbillard's part. And he is away until next week. If you think this is a bug please open a ticket so he won't miss it.

As an update to this, I noticed that it actually restored the pages/news/options... I wonder if it errored because I hadn't uploaded the albums yet so it couldn't update the album descs, tags etc?

Yes, of course , the albums/images have to be present on the new filesystem, too! Otherwise Zenphoto will consider them removed/not present. So upload the albums, but do not access them and then run setup. Then you have in the db what is on the file system.

Makes sense, though it's still a bit weird for me to think of a backup/restore as not creating the tables that were backed up.

Yes, of course that is weird if the tables itself are not created. But if you have table rows and then visit the site and Zenphoto does not find the images/albums matching those they are removed.

Zenphoto requrire that setup be run before anything else. Setup creates the tables, so they should be there for the restore. Restore will, of course, restore rows of the tables.

If the Zenphoto releases are different, then there may be some tables/fields that were backed up but have no place to be restored.

The released version of backup-restore does not take that into consideration. There is a ticket on this. Attached to that ticket is a backup-restore that will handle missing elements. But it will not be released until after 1.2.7 since we are in development freeze now.

There is no problem with the rows of missing albums/images so long as you do not do a database refresh. That is when the cleanup occurs.