I was looking at a picture on the old site, just the thumbnail, and when I click on it to view it full size I get this.
How does one now view pictures on the old site or if they’ve already been moved to the new, where are they?
John,
Yes, sometimes the old site won’t display the higher resolution images. They’re there, and it’s an intermittent problem. Sometimes they will display if you open the individual pic in a new tab, or different browser, sometimes they display if you hit refresh a few times.
We’re still working on migrating that content - we were having performance issues during the last round of testing. Hopefully those will be resolved soon.
Hi Andrew
I have had no luck seeing the photos using Firefox and/or Chrome. Is there a timeline for this being fixed?
Kind regards,
There’s a bit of a work around that sometimes works… it requires that you inspect the URL of the thumb picture and make modifications.
Example/tutorial:
Take my old posting on fixing X300 belt buckles for example @:
http://www.jag-lovers.org/snaps/snap_view.php3?id=1304995782
If you right click on the first thumbnail and “copy image location” … pasting that into notepad you’ll get:
“http://www.jag-lovers.org/snapsdata/tn_1~1304995782.jpg”
If you just “click” on the thumbnail you’ll get this long URL and NO picture:
If you check the URL of the missing picture on that page you’ll get where it’s supposed to be:
“http://www.jag-lovers.org/snapsdata/temp/snaps_resize_cc1a62ceee993783f7aeefc2ba868be5.jpg”
But the location the full photo still resides is sometimes easy to guess. Look at the URL of the thumbnail photo above and make an edit to take out the “tn_”
Now: http://www.jag-lovers.org/snapsdata/1~1304995782.jpg will take you to the right photo. You have to do this with any thumbnail you want to view, and I’d say it works about 80% of the time.
Change 1~ to 2~ and you’ll get the next in the “1304995782” picture series.
E.g. http://www.jag-lovers.org/snapsdata/2~1304995782.jpg
And so on…
~Paul K
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Great! Stumbled upon Paul’s post by chance.
I was afraid that I had lost my pictures for good, but this trick allowed me to download the images and archive them on my HDD.
However, I must say that the late Andrew Waugh’s definition for high resolution in post #2, and what is commonly considered “high-res” don’t agree. This can’t be the reason for the glitch.
Examples:
It belongs to my old album:
http://www.jag-lovers.org/snaps/snap_view.php3?id=1419987798
The image is 980x1180 pixels and only 129 kB.
The problem repeats itself for almost all of my 19 albums, yet, I used to resize all images that I made into albums to the optimal size and optimized the files for web-viewing.
I just want to point out that the definition of high res has changed considerably over the years. As has the power and storage capacity of computers. Anyway, Andrew said “higher resolution”, not “high resolution”. Everything is relative.
As a side note, Tony Bailey created the old Photo Album, back in 1999. Back then, a high end monitor had a resolution of 1024x768 pixels. A normal office computer had a resolution of 800x600 pixels. 8 bit color was the norm.
Today, I write this on a mid-range, 13" laptop with a resolution of 2560x1600 pixels at 32 bits depth. Things have certainly changed.
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With Andrew’s passing, the answer to that one is unfortunately “no”. We have all the data, but there are three main problems:
- The file names are all generic, and bear no resemblance to the contents. I.e. the files are all named “2~1222466000.jpg” and “tn_2~1076329739.jpg” and so on.
- Each album has an index file, and some of those index files are corrupt, for reasons we don’t understand. The upshot of this is that some albums have to be pieced back together manually.
- There are “11,899 Albums available containing 53,515 Images” (according to the old Photo Albums web page). That’s only half the truth, though. I just did a listing of the directory on the old server holding the image files, it has 119,188 files in it. Bottom line: This can’t be fixed manually, it must be done programmatically.
The good news is that the data is structured, even if the format is flat as a pancake.
Andrew put in a lot of work trying to import all the data into a more modern database, but he wasn’t quite done when he passed. We need someone to restart that work, someone who can come up with a way of:
- Determining the best way of hosting the albums (Discourse, Wordpress, or something else)
- Extracting the metadata for each album (who, what, when, where, etc.)
- Extracting the contents for each album (the actual images)
- Pushing the actual image files into the cloud (Amazon AWS S3, behind CloudFront)
- Putting it all back together as working albums that are searchable, and owned by the correct person
Do we know of anyone who could take on a job like this? I can help with some of this stuff (like getting the data into S3), but someone else needs to step up to do the coding.
Gunnar
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I have made a few changes to the code now and it works a little better.
Nick
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Looks like its still an issue. I find myself still having to do the URL editing.
Can we just have the images ported over to a new gallery area on the new site?
Absolutely, if we can just find a volunteer with the programming chops to do it.
Gunnar
1 Like
Wouldn’t be possible to create a Gallery category from now so people could start posting things there already?
Also everyone could transfer their old stuff there by themselves, taking some of the load off your hands.
Best regards,
Aristides
That’s a big improvement - a lot of the pictures are now instantly visible full sized. The old website photo albums are a huge resource of useful information and people (i.e. newer users) ought to be made more aware that searching the photo albums yields “hits” that can’t be had on the main site.
kind regards
Marek
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Yes, it’s a bit half and half. Half come up full-sized, and if you right-click and open in a new browser tab you can get them with the correct aspect ratio. The ones that come up broken, you can click on and get the full-sized version. So basically all the info should be there now. Which is arguably an improvement!
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I wanted to post a follow up “fix” for some albums where nothing shows up. Some additional insight.
E.g. this album (I needed to look at some of the pix of the X300 seat pot). In this case Tibor Makai’s album:
https://www.jag-lovers.org/snaps/snap_view.php3?id=1152831362
NO THUMBNAILS in this case AND the image links go nowhere.
Right click and open a thumbnail (broken) - open image in new tab.
That will yield the URL: https://www.jag-lovers.org/q/1~1152831362.JPG
Use: https://www.jag-lovers.org/snapsdata to replace the first part of the URL as follows:
“https://www.jag-lovers.org/snapsdata/1~1152831362.JPG”
This “Might” work for cases where this is both NO thumbnail preview AND the link does not go to a viable picture (sometimes they do despite the thumbnail absence).
~Paul K.