Author Topic: Uppgrade Fallout: Old Images Still Not Visible (Read 3826 times)

Ed Wenn · « **on:** July 13, 2010, 12:29:09 AM »

I've spent an hour looking into why the old images aren't appearing in their original posts and I'm none the wiser. We still have them in the correct directory and there appears to be no difference (at least as far as FTP and our web host's Java file manager are concerned) between them and the subsequent uploads which have all appeared as per normal. I don't have shell access to the site which is a bit of a limitation.

I thought it might be Mime types having been set wrongly post re-import or the fact that my FTP client may have defaulted to ASCII transfer instead of Binary, but neither of these seems to be the cause.

I did some Googling on the theme of 'images disappear after SMF upgrade', but didn't see much there which seemed relevant.

I know there are some computer geeks amongst us. Anyone have any ideas?

Miles · « **Reply #1 on:** July 13, 2010, 12:42:44 AM »

Odd that it's not "ALL" that have the prob. Thinking, all mine are uploaded from an MS Sch(v)ista PC and none post upgrade are visible.

That'll get the Mac & Unbuntu boys going

Ed Wenn · « **Reply #2 on:** July 13, 2010, 08:03:02 AM »

Miles, the one thing that I'm sure this has absolutely nothing to do with is the client OS...you little tinker.

Urban Hafner · « **Reply #3 on:** July 13, 2010, 08:24:23 AM »

So have you tried downloading one of the images via FTP and comparing it to the one downloaded via the web? It seems rather unlikely to me that a mime type could break an image.

Urban

Mike (happyforest) · « **Reply #4 on:** July 13, 2010, 01:31:17 PM »

ed

I found this on the SMF forums http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=230783.msg1484058#msg1484058

Not sure if it helps.

The old images I can see are those linked to site like flickr not those held on the FW server.

When upgrading were the orginal images files untouched by the upgrade or did they get reloaded from backup files.

Regards

Mike

Francois · « **Reply #5 on:** July 13, 2010, 04:16:59 PM »

Somehow, I can't stop thinking this might be related to the encoding used in the original JPG...
I know the forum software strips out some information (like EXIF and ITPC tags). Maybe the old version stripped out more than we thought...

Ed Wenn · « **Reply #6 on:** July 13, 2010, 05:33:06 PM »

Guys, thanks very much for the suggestions. I'll go through them all and see if any make a difference. We're recording a podcast tonight, so I may not get round to it until tomorrow.

Francois: the encoding option is very plausible.

astrobeck · « **Reply #7 on:** July 13, 2010, 07:37:51 PM »

Is the podcast about the recent upgrade fallout???

Always love the podcasts Ed!
You da Man!

Francois · « **Reply #8 on:** July 14, 2010, 10:11:33 PM »

Quote from: Miles on July 13, 2010, 12:42:44 AM

Thinking, all mine are uploaded from an MS Sch(v)ista PC and none post upgrade are visible.

On a totally off topic tech support note, I too am stuck with V on my laptop. I also discovered the only good program currently made by Norton. It's called Norton UAC (available free at the NortonLabs site). It replaces the User Access Control by a smarter panel and actually helps a lot in making Vista livable and a lot less annoying. Well worth checking it out.

Ed Wenn · « **Reply #9 on:** July 14, 2010, 11:47:06 PM »

Team, I have a horrible suspicion that I know why the old images aren't loading...and an even worse feeling that I can't fix it.

In order to backup the old forum prior to the upgrade I had to do two separate operations:

take a copy of all of the files in the root of the ./forum directory
and run a full backup of the MySQL database

There was a backup util available from our Web host for the MySQL which I used successfully, but for the contents of the ./forum directory I simply FTP'd the whole thing down to my PC. I used the Filezilla FTP client to run the copy and I suspect that the contents of the ./forum/attachments directory (i.e. the images) were all copied in 'Auto' mode....which probably means ASCII.

"But why transfer in ASCII if they're JPGs?" I hear some of you ask...

The thing is that image file names are changed when you post them to the forum and the attachment type is taken off the end. For example a file called Foggy Morning.jpg on your local computer gets renamed to the slightly less snappy 429_Foggy_Morning_jpg575548fccd1a25660233f5a38ccfc4f8 after you upload it here. This provides a good enough excuse for an FTP client to avoid seeing the JPG as a binary file.

I therefore reckon that the contents of the ./forum/attachments directory that I have on my PC are corrupted. I'm going to take a look on the server to see if there are any older backups of that directory, but I'm not holding out much hope.

I've had a trawl online, but I don't think there's a way of re-converting files back to BINARY from ASCII.

Thoughts?

Francois · « **Reply #10 on:** July 15, 2010, 04:21:59 PM »

You might try running this thing on them
http://www.photo-freeware.net/bad-peggy.php

It's supposed to fix truncations in the files and a host of things...

Edit
I tried right clicking and saving a random image and Bad Peggy simply tells me the file is corrupt... it doesn't work.

Mike (happyforest) · « **Reply #11 on:** July 16, 2010, 07:08:32 PM »

I've tried a few that claim to be able to repair corrupt jpegs but none of them worked.

The consensus of chat that I've seen out there is that once you've transferred them as ascii files they are
b*****ed.

Mike

Ed Wenn · « **Reply #12 on:** July 16, 2010, 08:51:50 PM »

Francois: Thanks for the suggestion re Bad Peggy, but I tried it yesterday and got the same result as you. Good try.

Mike: I think you're right. What a bummer!

Francois · « **Reply #13 on:** July 16, 2010, 09:35:36 PM »

Well, on the bright side it will give you a chance to clean up the database........

Mike (happyforest) · « **Reply #14 on:** July 16, 2010, 11:06:26 PM »

I have been playing.

I downloaded an image in ascii mode and binary mode from an old website of mine.

compared the two in a hex editor and identified the difference in the corrupted file which in this case was an extra 0D in front of some instances of 0A. Using the find replace function, I searched for each instance of 0D 0A and replaced it with 0A. Searching\replacing just 0D didn't work.

Below are the corrupted file and recovered.

I have tried this on one of the corrupted files on filmwasters but it didn't work.

I will play a bit more to see if I can identify the extra data that needs removing.

Mike

Ed Wenn · « **Reply #15 on:** July 16, 2010, 11:26:00 PM »

Hey Mike, this is very much appreciated and congrats on your uber-geekery in reclaiming the example image from the jaws of 'death by incorrect transfer mode'. However, please bear in mind that there are over 5000 images which got corrupted, so any fix process which can't be automated is almost certainly going to be unusable.

Mike (happyforest) · « **Reply #16 on:** July 17, 2010, 02:12:55 PM »

Ed

I've managed to recover an image that was on the website but only because I had the original to compare it against.

In this case this instead of having excess codes in this image was missing codes and unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any pattern to identify where these codes need to be inserted.

I hadn't considered how many images were on the site was just trying to see if the images could be recovered in any way.

Maybe I should put some this time\energy into taking some more photos.

Mike

Miles · « **Reply #17 on:** July 17, 2010, 04:57:24 PM »

Actually Ed, this just proves your "Analogue Terrorist" credentials really, striking a blow against the the binary despots.

Moral Victory anyone ?

(All Hum "The International")

Francois · « **Reply #18 on:** July 17, 2010, 10:39:03 PM »

I even tried HappyForest's solution on another file... didn't work. It seems the values are totally different from file to file...

But I did ding a nice free hex editor that runs portably

(portably isn't a word is it?)

Edit

Here's the answer...
http://forum.filezilla-project.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16120

result: unfixable.

Urban Hafner · « **Reply #19 on:** July 19, 2010, 02:28:35 PM »

Totally unrelated, but I thought I'd post it here instead of opening a new thread. I have the feeling that the new forum layout isn't as wide as the old one. When I attach images that are 800px wide I get an ugly horizontal scroll bar. For me as a web developer that's one of the worst things ever

Is there a way to change the layout? If not maybe we should require that the images are at most 750px (or so) wide ...

Urban

Francois · « **Reply #20 on:** July 19, 2010, 03:08:22 PM »

It is narrower the the previous version. From memory, the previous version was full screen.

Phil Bebbington · « **Reply #21 on:** July 19, 2010, 10:25:31 PM »

500 or 600 px seems ample big enough when posting images, in my opinion.

Ed Wenn · « **Reply #22 on:** July 19, 2010, 11:30:42 PM »

Quote from: urbanhafner on July 19, 2010, 02:28:35 PM

Totally unrelated, but I thought I'd post it here instead of opening a new thread. I have the feeling that the new forum layout isn't as wide as the old one. When I attach images that are 800px wide I get an ugly horizontal scroll bar. For me as a web developer that's one of the worst things ever Is there a way to change the layout? If not maybe we should require that the images are at most 750px (or so) wide ...

Urban

Hi Urban, I was aware of the this issue and thought I had selected the option to re-size all large images to a max width of 600 pixels. It turns out that I must have been dreaming because the option was unchecked...a situation which has now been remedied.

Thanks for the feedback.

Author Topic: Uppgrade Fallout: Old Images Still Not Visible (Read 3826 times)

astrobeck