Thread: Missing pictures.

Originally Posted by ubeaut

It's a bit disappointing a few more who lost pics haven't tried to at least have a go at replace some of them, instead of throwing their hands up in the air and giving up.

Cheers - Neil

It may not be a simple case of throwing hands up in the air and giving up as suggested as not everyone may have kept a perfectly indexed backup set of the photos posted to the forum.

I have always relied on the assurance that the photos posted direct to the forums would be available forever and with upgrading computers over the years a lot of them I have lost myself. This never worried me as I expected the forum's copies to be there.

I still have some that may be I could put back but at my age my remaining time has become too precious to sit at the computer for days to do this.


Peter.

Originally Posted by Dry Water

Just letting everyone know - I have replaced all my missing pics!! Big job but done and am sticking with this Forum

Well done, but how many photos were involved?

Also noticed 90+% of your posts are into one thread which would make it a bit easier.
It's not quite so easy when the photos are spread across many forums.

Originally Posted by Sturdee

I have always relied on the assurance that the photos posted direct to the forums would be available forever and with upgrading computers over the years a lot of them I have lost myself. This never worried me as I expected the forum's copies to be there.
Peter.

Im in the same boat as Peter except I had no expectation of "assurance". However, because of my computer naivety, I had slipped into the bad habit of presuming that the forum pictures would be permanent. I even used the forum as an easy way to locate my own pictures relating to a particular subject or project because the forums filing 'system' was infinitely better than my own! To me, the computer is a tool to help me learn and share my woodworking successes and failures. I've had to learn HOW to use it to get, and give, the most from my woodwork. My very enjoyable time on the forum has even overlapped my conversion from film to digital! It has now overlapped my conversion from no 'system' to a rudimentary library BUT, what drives me is my love of woodwork, NOT an enjoyment of binary logic? I have no intention of taking my bat and ball and going home BUT I have had to develop a filing system, I have become sceptical of things that I had previously taken for granted and I am willing to find a picture that someone MIGHT need, but I'd rather do woodwork than research and search for pictures to re-insert into an old thread that no-one may never read again?
The forum, and the people I have met through the forum, have given me great enjoyment and I hope will continue to do so. If anyone wants me to find a particular picture, I am very happy to do it but, in the one instance where this has already happened, I actually did a 're-enactment' and re-photographed it!
LONG LIVE THE FORUM and, once again Neil, thank you.

fletty

I reckon I'd still have most of my photos but I don't have the time to dig through almost 14,000 posts to fix them.

If there is anything that anybody wants a copy of, let me know & I'll go & find it.

What I do is place my photos in a folder named for each of my projects.
However, I haven't been on the forum long and have not posted near as many pictures as others and my posts were not affected by the recent loss.

Originally Posted by woodPixel

Reaaallly dumb question: are the images deleted, or has the forum software simply deleted the reference to it? I.e are there orphaned unreferenced images?

I ask as I was (am?) a dev for 15 years (PHP, java, perl, .Net) and could write up a script to find unreferenced/orphaned images, get their date time and try to match those to posts. I could do this at night, gratis, for fun. If that is fruitful, then write a module to admin all the fixes to trusted individuals.

Thanks for the offer woodPixel

Unfortunately it was a major brain fart by vBulletin that did the deletions. The rough story goes something like this: They included a script or something similar in an update, which in rough words deleted photo's that it deemed to unused ie had not been viewed for so many weeks or something along those lines.

Big problem is that they didn't tell anyone about this and it took some 3 - 4 mths for it to be noticed and by this time the damage had been done, not just to WWf but to all forums around the world who installed that particular upgrade. The photos were deleted completely and in some instances completely destroyed some forums who relied almost entirely on photos.

Had vBulletin let their users know up front or early enough the problem may well have been able to be averted, but they didn't, so it wasn't.

We do keep photos on a separate secure site. If we could have restored them we would have done. I'll have a talk to Steven and see if they are all still on the other server but he was pretty adamant that it wasn't possible to restore them even with a specially written script.

Cheers-Neil

PS When we found out about the problem we gave the members a headsup and allowed them access to their posts to replace missing pics but most didn't realise they had lost them until much much later when they had been physically removed by the program. I replaced a number of photos in a couple of forums but without any assistance from posters it was almost impossible. To add to the woes there was a change in the way SEO links were written which compounded the problems even further.

I saw the earlier post about how the vBulletin did the "unmatched and therefore delete" after I posted. This is pretty typical of how programmers think... but a really good one would think "unmatched, therefore move to another archive directory".

It happens. A lot.

If I can be of assistance... just ask. I'm an uncannily crafty IT guy.

Well, I've had a bit of a go which "took a little while ".

Ploughing through 2 computers and heaps of pix I have isolated 196 which, as far as I can remember are forum related.

My dilemma is.....

1. If I took 6 shots of a project/jig I possibly only loaded up 4 to the forum, I can't recall which 4.

2. How would it be possible to upload this many pix?

3. If uploaded, how could they be put into the correct threads?

4. Due to storage on backup hard drives which have undergone quite a few software upgrades, it appears that the original dates of the pix have changed to a few different common dates, so my scheme of trying to match posting dates to threads doesn't work.

I'm happy to make them available but am open to suggestions as to how.

A few months ago, I had an opportunity to re-attach some pictures to an old thread, as explained in post #7 here: Wobblers

As noted, I got a request via a Forum email. If anybody has a similar request, do as SawTooth1953 did, and I'll try to find appropriate pictures; not necessarily the originals.

Cheers,
Joe