Support community for TTG plugins and products.
NOTICE
The Turning Gate's Community has moved to a new home, at https://discourse.theturninggate.net.
This forum is now closed, and exists here as a read-only archive.
You are not logged in.
Rod, as I mentioned last night, I moved one of my Backlight installations to a new server and upgraded the related Backlight installation from 1.23 to 3.02. I am now plugging my way through republishing the 100 or so albums included in the gallery and have a new issue for you. Whenever I right click on an album to mark it to be republished the following error message appears in three separate stacked error dialog boxes:
"Unable to perform action:
getSetupForTemplate
The album could not be found for id 99999.
Please edit this album and try again."
I can work around the error by closing the error dialog panels, right clicking on the album in the Publisher list, selecting the edit button, and when the edit dialog panel opens clicking on the edit button to complete the edit action (even though no action was taken). This appears to clear the error. I can then mark the album to be republished and click the “Publish Now” button to put it in the publish queue. Publication works as expected.
Is there a better way to recover from this situation?
My initial plan was to mark multiple albums for republishing at once and let Lightroom do its thing. When Lightroom asked if I wanted to select all for republication, I initially declined wanting to test the procedure with a few albums rather than all 100. After discovering the issue and testing the above workaround with a few albums I ultimately elected to allow Lightroom to mark all images to be republished, but that choice made no difference in the issue. I still have to go through the albums one at a time to clear the error. Not a trivial issue given the number of albums I have to handle one at a time.
I’d appreciate your input,
Offline
Sorry, I’m not sure what’s happening. This is more of a Ben question so I suggest waiting on him. He may need admin access to Backlight.
Rod
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site
Offline
Have you accidentally removed or replaced the backlight/data file during upgrade?
Offline
I moved the gallery from another server to this one by downloading it to my laptop from the first server & then uploading the entire gallery directory to the new server. Both servers are managed by HostGator. The gallery was in Backlight 1.22 or 1.23 when it was moved. After the move I upgraded it to Backlight 3.02. Did not replace the backlight/data directory.
Offline
your albums need the database too. Did you also copy over the backlight/data folder?
Rod
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site
Offline
At this point I’m not sure what I’m gaining by keeping the gallery & images moved from the old server. All album sets and albums are being uploaded again from Lightroom. If I downloaded and saved the templates, reinstalled a clean version of Backlight 3.02, imported the templates, and started uploading again I suspect I’d be ahead of where we are now with the system uncertainties I’m encountering.
Offline
your albums need the database too. Did you also copy over the backlight/data folder?
Yes, I copied everything in the gallery directory on the old server, uploaded it to the new server & then started the upgrade process as described in your documentation.
Offline
rod barbee wrote:your albums need the database too. Did you also copy over the backlight/data folder?
Yes, I copied everything in the gallery directory on the old server, uploaded it to the new server & then started the upgrade process as described in your documentation.
Sorry, when I said gallery, I meant the entire PhotoAlbum folder including the backlight folder and it’s contents and the gallery folder plus whatever other folders are in there for your standard Backlight installation.
Offline
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?
Offline
The structure, images and text content are available in Lightroom. The directory contains around 4,800 images in over 100 albums spread across 8 album sets. The original collection still exists on the old server and is located here: http://nfarl.us/PhotoAlbum/gallery/. It is still in Backlight 1.22 or 1.23.
Offline
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.
Offline
Read through the below steps to see whether you think it's worth doing.
I'll give it a shot. I was working in the reverse of what you suggest but not a problem to reverse course.
So you are not in favor of trashing the web folder containing Backlight and gallery folders, reloading Backlight, my templates, the Publisher API and starting anew from Lightroom?
Offline
Well, I tried the suggested procedure and was successful with the first album set and album (it only contained one album). When I tried the second album set's set level record it failed with the following error message:
"Can't update this collection.
Unable to perform action: getSetupForTemplate
The album could not be found for id 67020. Please edit this album and try again."
I tried the procedure with the first album in the second album set and got the same message, including the same id 67020.
I next tried the procedure with the second album in the second album set and was successful. That album now is visible in its web album set page and I can scroll through its images.
Ditto for second album set - third album. The second set first album that could not be published earlier is still not visible on the Web album set page.
Ditto for albums 4 & 5 in the second album set.
I next detoured back and tried to edit & publish the second album set. Same message. HOWEVER when I tried to edit & publish the first album in the set which had failed earlier, it was successful. I did have to hit the Publish Now button twice to get it to publish all of the images but it finally went to end of job. It now appears in the Web album set and I can scroll through its images.
I next tried again to edit and publish the second album set but it failed with the "Can't update this collection" error message but this time the message pointed to id 65206 instead of 67020. Wish I had a way of knowing what album is 65206. I'm gonna guess it is the next album in line to be published. (This turned out to be correct - when editing the next album, I got the "Unable to perform action: getSetupForTemplate" message and it referenced id 65206.)
You are right, it is tedious but I think we are on the right track. I'll keep plugging away. Send me any suggestions that this note brings to mind.
Offline
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.
Offline
I've finished the first and second sets - 16 albums in total. After I finished editing and publishing the albums in the second set, I successfully edited and published the second album set - no errors this time. Hooray!
I know this input is way overboard but I hope it proves helpful in your research into what can be done to prevent others from falling into the trap I did.
Offline
I wanna send a big "thank you" to your team for adding the number of photos per album to the Backlight Admin -> Publisher tab -> Gallery -> Album list. I don't know when it was added, but it has really simplified my recovery process. The Lightroom Publish Services "Publish Now" process has a way of quitting before all albums are published and the count lets me audit where I am on each album. It has also allowed me to edit two or three albums within a set and publish them at the same time without losing track of album completion. When the Album list count for an album matches the Lightroom Publish Services count I know it is done. :-)
Offline