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That sounds like you're on the right track. The errors you're seeing are when the albums can't be found when first editing them in LR. Saving them in LR will create them on the server with new IDs. Even though this is tedious, the function to create the album if it doesn't exist (even if it is expected to exist) is by design, to allow them to be re-created in cases like yours.
Not to trivialize the tedium, but it's a task that could be done while watching TV or similar.
I didn't recommend starting from scratch as I assumed that would be a more difficult way of doing things. I would personally much rather mindlessly click multiple times than have to re-create an album structure from scratch, with the work needed to set titles, options, drag photos in, etc.
That's quite a few albums and photos. We have no way of propagating albums and photos from your server to LR, so reconnecting has to be done from LR. The approach to reconnect them on the new server will be tedious. Read through the below steps to see whether you think it's worth doing.
1) Change the API URL to your new site (which it sounds like you've already done)
2) One by one, edit and save each album set in your LR Publisher instance. This needs to be done from the top level down. So if for example you have the following hierarchy:
set-one
set-one/subset-one
set-one/subset-one/album-one
set-two
set-two/album-two
You would edit/save set-one before subset-one and subset-one before album-one, and likewise for set-two before set-two/album-two
3) Mark all of the photos in each album for republishing then clicking publish. Do this one-by-one rather than trying to mark all photos in an album set for republishing then trying to publish photos from multiple albums at the same time.
I suggest working through some of the higher-level album sets/albums first, and re-publishing the photos. See whether this works without error and that the album sets/albums appear correctly on your website. That will save a lot of time working through all of them in case the process doesn't work for you.
Galleries in Backlight are database-driven. They need both the files under a 'galleries' folder and the corresponding database entries to be in place. Copying over a galleries directory from one site to another won't make the necessary additions to the database.
The database entries can be re-created in a semi-manual way. How many albums and photos are in the directory you've copied over? Is the full structure of those albums still within your Publisher instance in Lightroom?
Have you accidentally removed or replaced the backlight/data file during upgrade?
Hi John, please see my reply to your email.
Hi John, Backlight 3 should work on PHP 5.6 through 7.4, so 7.2 and 7.3 should be fine.
Unfortunately, 500 errors don't provide information on what's gone wrong. Can you provide me with FTP access via email so that I can look into this?
Try restarting LR to see if that fixes it. The API Key can get cached.
Hi Rick, the execution time is set in the php.ini file using the variable max_execution_time. If you have access to the php.ini file, or your own file somewhere under your html directory, then try changing that to a higher value.
Another option would be to edit the file backlight/.htaccess and add a line like this:
php_value max_execution_time 60Where 60 should double the allowed time. In either case, setting it to 31 would be a good start to verify that the timeout has been changed. If successful then the message would read '...Maximum execution time of 31 seconds exceeded…'.
Can you email me the file backlight/data/publisher/master.sq3? I'll see whether there are any optimisations that can be made to speed up that query.
Hi Kevin, I don't have experience with Site Lock. Are you running any other software on your site, in particular Wordpress? That is typically the biggest area of concern. If you are running Wordpress then use the Wordfence plugin, which does a lot of the work to protect the installation and provides security warnings.
I recommend running SSL if you're not already, and to enable two-factor authentication in Backlight. We have no known security vulnerabilities and code defensively to avoid common security issues.
Feel free to share the warnings here, and I'll advise on the nature of them and if I can, whether there's anything of concern. If they're confidential in nature (e.g. revealing local server paths or similar) then please email them to me instead.
I think you are being very unfair here. Looking at your posting history, you’ve had two things you’ve asked about in the past year. So it doesn’t seem that you’re getting stuck over and over again. The first was installation problems. They were particular to your setup and the actions you had taken, and there’s no way that we could document our way to a solution for that case. The second was about full screen galleries. Rod replies quickly and you were able to get it working.
In both cases we promptly assisted you. In one case you may have been better served with documentation. We continue to work on it. Matt has put a huge amount of effort into the new documentation and has stated above that it will take him a full day to get search going, based on your suggestion. But, he or us are labelled as deplorable.
As I said, unfair.
Yes, we both work full time outside of TTG and have other commitments as well. As much as I’d like to be cruising around my neighbourhood in a Porsche with TTG decals, that’s not where we are. My apologies if you consider that to be sarcastic. It’s not intended to be.
I wonder if there's a setting in the forum software. Any wait may not apply to Rod and me as we're both moderators. There's nothing I can find in the settings I have access to. We'll look into it.
Rest assured we're not trying to make your life difficult.
Hi Mel, I'm not sure what is causing that. Can you please email me a Backlight admin login, so that I can look into it?
Are you using the Wordpress NextGEN plugin?
Hi Mel, this is a Backlight 1 issue. Your host is using a new version of PHP that is no longer compatible with our code. Two options are to either downgrade the version of PHP in the control panel to 5.6. If that's available that might work for the short term, but PHP 5.6 is no longer being supported. The other option is to upgrade to Backlight 3. We support up to 7.4 on Backlight 3 and will support any future releases of PHP in the next year.
You're partly right on the need for FTP/SFTP. That's at least needed to upload the installer files, or to upload custom stylesheets or PHPlugins files. But it's not needed for the running of the site itself. The Lightroom module publishes via HTTP, and the Backlight admin uses HTTP by virtue of it being web-based. If I was in a position where I had to incur a high daily cost for FTP access, I would disable it after installing the site.
It sounds like FTPing through the load balancer was the culprit. I use AWS a lot, including running load balancers that farm out work to multiple EC2 instances. Our server admin access has always been directly to the respective EC2 instances via SSH or sftp, and not through the load balancer. That requires each EC2 instance to either have their own public IP address, or to access with local IPs on a VPN (I haven't set up that VPN but instead use a service set up by real system admins, and not myself who is more of a developer. So I don't know how viable that option is for a layman).
Something’s not right here. Backlight uses HTTP to upload images, not sftp (or FTP). I can’t find the pricing for opening up sftp on a load balancer. Can you point me to it?
What’s your business need for a load balancer? Were you running your site across multiple instances and if so was that because of high levels of traffic or other needs?
Which version of our products were you running?
Backlight sites are not static, hence the requirement for PHP. It won’t run on S3 alone.
Can you elaborate on the cost associated with FTP. Some of TTG infrastructure runs on AWS, and I’m able to access it for updates using SFTP on an EC2 server without additional cost. The machine costs something like 5-7 USD a month in total.
Depending on the volume of photos and traffic, you could get away with a ‘tiny’ or ‘small’ instance.
Hi Mike, thanks for the suggestion. The best approach for now is to set the cover image via the Backlight admin.
I have not heard that this is a widespread concern. Have you found the lack of ordering to be an issue?
Since we can't see your site and determine how your environment and setup have influenced things, there's no insight I can add.
The area is not displayed when the cover image is not set in the album. Search results are a specialised type of album that don’t have a cover image set. I can’t see that change affecting embedded albums.
I checked that the API call works: https://tomowens.openpoint.co.uk/backli … lbum/55496
so that can be ruled out. One possibility is that the server or browser is unable to fetch from that URL.
No nearer a solution. Have you considered setting the cover image using the Backlight admin instead? Let me know if that works for you.
I’ll be moving this into Backlight 3 Customisation
That's great. I will put in a proper fix in the next maintenance update. FYI, your site was trying to load a module called backlight-3. It should have been trying to download 'core' which covers all the core modules. I've worked around this on the server, but will change Backlight itself to instead attempt to download the 'core' files.
That's great to hear! Thanks for letting us know.