Change A Subgallery in to a primary gallery?

[baldrich]

Can this be done?
I originally had 3-4 subgalleries under Greece. When I combined them into one it became a sub gallery and I want to get it back on top as the primary without losing all the comments from the subgallery.
It appears to be undoable.
What a mess!

Help!

[richo]

Can this be done?
I originally had 3-4 subgalleries under Greece. When I combined them into one it became a sub gallery and I want to get it back on top as the primary without losing all the comments from the subgallery.
It appears to be undoable.
What a mess!

Help!

Not sure what steps you took, but you should be able to move a gallery from one location to another. To do this you have to go to the parent gallery above the one you want to move. Edit the parent gallery and use the "Move Selected Items to Another Gallery " option. This same option can be used to copy items from one gallery to another. Items are just metadata, so that includes images or galleries. I have done this before, but it has been at least a couple years - so I would test this using a test gallery.

[baldrich]

Yes, that I've done , but I don't want to lose all the comments/votes and they will disappear if I do this.

[richo]

Yes, that I've done , but I don't want to lose all the comments/votes and they will disappear if I do this.

Not sure that will happen....but I'm curious enough to run a test with some test galleries.

Update:

Here are the tests I conducted -

For a primary gallery at the root
1. Added a public and private comments to a test gallery that was a primary gallery under the root.
2. Moved the test gallery to another gallery where it became a sub-gallery.
3. All comments were still attached to the test gallery.
4. Moved the test gallery back to the root where it became a primary gallery again.
5. All comments were still attached to the test gallery.

For an image
1. Added comments to a test image
2. Moved image to another gallery
3. Comments were still attached.
4. Moved image back to its original gallery.
5. Comments were still attached.

As I had already suspected and if I remember it is stated in the help guide that images and galleries are just metadata. So their relationships to other items are also metadata. Images are different types of metadata in that they can not be parents of galleries.

Try the above tests for yourself and see if you get the same results.
(caveat emptor: I am not a Pbase support person. I am only a paying customer.)

[dw_thomas]

It seems to me comments and votes are linked to whatever node in the tree of the gallery hierarchy they appear. The ones at the 'end nodes";e.g., images, can move along with the image, as they could be part of that object. But when at the next levels -- gallery or sub-gallery -- doing something that eliminates a node (gallery) should more or less of necessity ditch the votes and comments for that node. I am not aware of any way for users to move comments (other than deleting them). There is a link with the misleading title "Comment management" in our profiles but the choices are public/non-public and delete -- pretty low key managing!

If I have a set of galleries "Tuesday," "Wednesday," and "Thursday," I could merge the three sets of images by moving (at image level) all the pictures to one of the galleries. I would expect to still have the comments at the individual images (and original comments in/from the destination gallery). The two source galleries I moved from would be empty and the only option would be to delete them (or add more/new images). At deletion, I expect the comments associated with those galleries would be gone. My olde retired self is too lazy to do the work to test my hypothesis but I'll be surprised if I'm wrong.

Another approach is to create a new gallery ("Mid-Week") at whatever level desired and move the contents of all three into it -- but that would still lose the comments from the source galleries (although not from the images). Myself, I often go the other way, that works and is easy. I had a gallery of infrared shots that was standalone for awhile. After shooting some more I felt a need to put up additional galleries for those topics so I created "top_infrared" and made the previous gallery a sub-gallery of it (by moving it) without losing anything related to it. I would expect that process would be more common as a user typically adds images rather than removing. You can change the names of existing galleries too should that seem desirable as an organizational tool.

If PBase were really operating and responsive, I suppose they could produce another menu selection in editing for "Merge Galleries" where you could check a series of sub-galleries, pick a destination gallery, click "Do it" and stand back while it consolidated all the images, votes and comments into the destination gallery. Given the number of features that are currently begged for, and the utilities that are broken or degraded in function, I would not expect to see 'Merge Galleries' in this decade (century?)

Edit: Looks like Richo did some of the work I was too lazy to do (Thanks! ) which appears to jibe with my expectations.

[dw_thomas]

It also occurs to me that allowing a user to move comments (worse yet, votes) willy-nilly could result in total confusion or misrepresentation of what they were originally about. And given the comments are by other viewers, not the gallery owner, I could envision that occasionally stirring up a ruckus!

Joe Schmoe
This gallery has some of the most beautiful scenes I have ever viewed on PBase!

Formerly logged on a set of Hawaiian sunsets could reappear in a gallery of a massively trashed town or city post flood or tornado, etc. -- confusing and messy.