PBase

Does anyone notice missing images from their galleries?
I keep a copy of my galleries in folders on disk. I was going back through some previous years and found several images in my folders that are not in my Pbase gallery.

richo wrote:Does anyone notice missing images from their galleries?
I keep a copy of my galleries in folders on disk. I was going back through some previous years and found several images in my folders that are not in my Pbase gallery.

Not me. I just went through some ancient ones that I've not looked at in literally years from my earliest days on the site in the late noughties, and all seem to be present and accounted for. Are you sure that all of the photos were ever uploaded? I know that I sometimes generate photos into folders on my hard drive, but don't upload them until I've done a sufficient quantity of them. Some have been sitting there for a year or two.

One way of confirming (maybe) is to take a look at The Wayback Machine. PBase isn't a heavily indexed site (Google seems to barely index it at all these days), but The Wayback Machine does seem to index some gallery pages periodically. (Though that said, it has never indexed my current PESO gallery, but there are several snapshots of my last PAD gallery from 2016; "Saved 6 times between March 18, 2017 and November 30, 2022".) Anyway, IF you find that the gallery that the shots should be in has been indexed by TWM, and IF the shots are shown in the gallery (and you do need to search for galleries, not images) THEN you can at least demonstrate that they have vanished to PBase support. It's worth a shot anyway.

(This presupposes that anyone is manning PBase support at the moment. At the end of January I raised a request for a missing camera to be added to the database, and followed it up last week. Aside from the ZenDesk autoreply from the original request, the only sound I've heard thus far is crickets.)

That's a good suggestion. I will check with the Internet Archive.

Update: the Internet Archive only archives the first page of each gallery. I might be able check the number pages times what I remember the number of images per page and compare to my folders.

I haven't noticed any missing (but that doesn't guarantee it hasn't happened).

Is there some sort of placeholder, but no JPEG? Or does it just leave one less entry on a row; e.g, totally gone? Either way it might suggest some sort of PBase database corruption. Perhaps even a "minor repair" replaced a chunk of it with an out of date backup. IF (ha ha hahahaha) the site runs on some sort of serious commercial DB platform, mayhaps there are tools to do checks and repairs etc. (Oh sure, let me dream!!! ) I do have vague recollections that after one of the previous -- uh -- "disturbances," the management solicited reports of similar situations. That might imply there is some repair process.

Another thought if you have multiple instances of such disappearances, is there any time and date related info common to the files? Perhaps some process misbehaved way back when and was later fixed but not all data totally recovered. That could be a hint for where the mechanics should look in their logs. (LOGS? )

"links-to-links-to-links-to-links-to-... "

Like you, (after some ancient system crashes), I have a directory hierarchy here at home that matches my PBase galleries. Besides image files I have HTML files to incorporate layout, sequencing, and captions, plus the gallery heading blather. The image to image navigation is just back up and go forward to the next, but enough is there to rebuild the PBase stuff from scratch -- but all manual -- 'twould be a helluva job though! Since fear of crashes led me to that, I now create the backup here for new galleries before upload. That's vaguely useful for checking the sequencing, etc. before firing it up to PBase. (Of course the additional amount of work may account for why chunks of several major excursions seem to have escaped completion.)

So I just figure to not worry too much unless someone reports it or I trip over it myself. It's true though if an entry is rebuilt by the owner, the rebuild would lose the comments, but whatever!

I appreciate the reply. It's not consistent which makes it difficult to even see a pattern. I do annual wildflower reports, so each year I use certain images as examples. That is how I noticed a few missing from 2019. I shot the solar eclipse one year and the image was shown on TV. I went to find the link and couldn't find the image in my galleries, but it is in the folder on my computer and my backups. Maybe it's an alternative reality thing.

richo wrote: . . . Maybe it's an alternative reality thing.

I tellya, there's a lotta that goin' around lately!

DaveT