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The Writing Life of a Tadpole

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Tag Archives: organizing

#50by50 #23 Part 8 – Fix my digital photo gallery – The final step

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on April 16, 2018 by PolyWoggApril 26, 2018  

Phase IV: Killing my SmugMug account

My annual renewal date for my SmugMug account is in May, and I wanted everything done by then.

I did all the uploading. I added the captions. I tested the videos and replaced the ones that didn’t work with converted formats. I sorted  and organized the order in each album. And then I re-linked everything to the blog articles that had photos in them. I also found some time in there to tweak the organization as I went, like moving cooking ones into a separate folder and doing virtual links back to the regular folders, adding in a lot of my humour and TV review photos even if they don’t need captions, etc.

It took a bit of time. Two months in fact. And it’s now DONE. Well at least that portion of it.

As I went, I got ideas for some blog entries. Plus some other ideas for uses of my photos. Found a few errors in other parts of the website. So I had to noted them on my update list, and some day I’ll get to them. Maybe now I can rest from the website work for a bit and then start on doing a few photobooks. 🙂

And just to close out the project? I closed and deleted my commercial account. RIP SmugMug, you served me well, but it’s time I saw other websites (like my own that is comparatively free).

The PandA gallery is up and live: https://polywogg.ca/pandafamily/.


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#50by50 #23 Part 7 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Re-linking photos and video

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on April 14, 2018 by PolyWoggApril 26, 2018  

Phase III: Fixing an embedding problem in WordPress

One of the things I do with my photos, besides having them in a gallery, is embed them in various posts in my WordPress blog. For example, I have a section on the site dealing with an HR student conference from back in 2002, and I have a small album of photos with the conference docs. Those photos are stored with my Piwigo gallery, and embedded as a hot link in the WordPress pages. Simple, right?. But here’s the problem. The link to each photo currently says:

http://thepandafamily.smugmug.com/yada yada yada

Now that I have the new gallery up and running, if I simply delete the old one, those links won’t work. I have to change ALL of them to say:

http://www.polywogg.ca/pandafamily/yada yada yada

It isn’t a huge challenge, just under 100 posts in total with maybe 400 photos linked. But each photo or video link has to have the SmugMug link deleted and the Piwigo link pasted BEFORE I delete the SmugMug account. If I don’t do it first, then my WordPress site will suddenly have a bunch of broken links all through it and no photos showing from my gallery.

But of course it isn’t as simple as just a search and replace of the opening domain info — the “yada yada yada” is completely different for each site. So they have to be done manually. Since it is easier to do while the two galleries are both running, i.e. so I can view them side-by-side on the screen and copy the links from the new to replace the old, it is still a pain in the patootie. With the uploading and captioning done, I’m about 50% done the re-linking process. But I got my account renewal reminder the other day … SmugMug renews in less than a month and I wanted to be done before then so I won’t get charged for another year.

I did the first few, and they were easy-peasy. So I thought the “rest” would be the same. Strange, but I feel like it was both less work and more work than I expected. How can that be?

Well, I feel like there were “only 98” posts with the cross-linked photos, which seemed like a manageable number. In addition, many of them only had one or two photos, so pretty quick. All in all, that meant I was initially feeling like it was less work than I expected and would go pretty fast.

Right up until I hit some of the photo-rich posts like stories about Being Jacob’s father or various trips we took. Some of them took a LONG time to update. But the weird part is I feel like the photos are somehow “brighter”? That’s weird. I wonder if the filters and themes at Smugmug that I was using were muted somehow. Anyway, I really like how it looks now.

And I’m finally done. It took a bit of time, maybe 6 or 7 hours in total to do the updating of the 98 posts, although in fairness, some of that was because I was sucked into reading my own posts again and editing a bit as I went. 🙂

But everything is re-linked. Whew.


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#50by50 #23 Part 6 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Tweaking the view

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on April 14, 2018 by PolyWoggApril 26, 2018  

I was right, uploading took a whack of time. I also don’t much like one aspect of the upload window — if something “fails”, it gives you an error while the screen is still uploading so you can see it, but once the rest of the uploads are done, it just rolls over to a new screen showing the successful uploads. No continued error message to say “64 uploaded, 2 didn’t”. So I wasn’t monitoring as I went, and later in the subsequent phases, I’ve discovered “missing” photos and videos i.e. ones that for some reason didn’t upload successfully the first time. Not a huge problem to fix, just annoying. If the result page showed the “failed” ones, I would have fixed immediately upon upload.

I also underestimated the final size. I thought about 10K in photos, which is about right for the family photos. But with everything else on the site, there are actually 14,147 photos, 500 albums, 24 plugins and 25.1 GB of data. Wow. But that part is “done” (small caveat — there are a few months where there are some special photo collections my wife took, so I’ll need her to figure out which ones of those should be included).

Phase II: Preparing the folders and pictures for viewing

While uploading took time, it was generally mindless, something I could spend a few minutes sorting and adding in the ones to upload, and then clicking the button to start. It could take 60 seconds, or 10 minutes, depending on how many pics or how long of videos, but it was background computer stuff while I do other things.

But once the upload was complete, I also had to start playing with the files and albums online to make them presentable. Oddly enough, one of the first things I had to do is tell it to generate all the “little” thumbnail and square size photos in the background. It does it fast enough, the server I mean, while I wait. Another background task. But I need it done because the second step is to play with the display order, and while doing that, I need to be able to move files around by looking at their little thumbnails. But once uploaded, it’s ON the website, not within a file browser, so there’s no “viewing processor” running to let me see it easily. Instead, the website creates the little thumbnails as extra files and then displays them for manipulation.

In an easier world, the photos I was uploading would all have the exact same filenaming taxonomy, and thus once uploaded, I could sort by the creation date (for example) and everything would be in order.

Except some of the pics come from my DSLR. Others come from Andrea’s iPhone. Others come from a small pocket camera. And still others come from two different apps in my Android phone. Which means they all have their own filenaming convention, and they don’t “sort” easily. And if I edited them at all on the computer, with a crop for example, often the software changes the metainfo so that the file creation date is the date I did the editing, not the original “taken” date. Don’t even get me started on images sent to me by other people where they’ve named them “Dave and Janet at the lake” and then “At the lake with Dave and Janet”. The anal-retentive side of me wanted to impose a filenaming convention, sort them all, get them looking identical, and then upload.

But that is way overkill when it takes me 60 seconds of viewing on my desktop to decide on which photo I’m looking for in a batch. This isn’t a “shared” server where we all have to use the same convention. Ultimately I don’t care what the filename is, other than for quick reference. But, since I can’t rely on the filename or the creation date, I do a manual sort. Most of the time, I do a default filename sort plus the original upload order, and then I just move a few things around. Like putting all the photos of Uncle Dave together, even if I took a couple of other people in between.

However, merely putting them in a good order is not necessarily the biggest job. In most cases, since I already had a working gallery elsewhere, with the same photos already uploaded there (alas, I couldn’t transfer directly), most of the time I’m just matching the new gallery’s order to the old gallery’s order. So, again, most of the time, the order isn’t that time consuming. But for some reason, one of the ones I did today was brutal (about 75 photos in the middle of the batch didn’t get uploaded, and when I did upload them, it gave me a huge batch at the end of the collection that had to be moved — one by one — up to the right space).

At this point, I had a gallery with pictures and videos in them, sounds good, right? Except they had no captions. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was annoyed that I had to put the same info twice in the meta data — once for title so it would appear on the album page, and once for description so it would appear on the single photo pages. I reached out to the Piwigo community, and heard nothing back over the course of a week or two. Okay, I guessed I would have to paste it twice. Then it occurred to me. I had chosen a theme where I *should* be able to alter this in the template, but in reading the template files, I couldn’t find the fields to change. I was looking for something called TITLE or NAME and DESCRIPTION, since that is what the admin pages call them. So I posted on the discussion page for my particular theme, hoping successfully that the creator of the theme would respond.

Which he did. Except his first response was “Good idea, make it a plugin and upload it to the repository”. Except if I *could* do that level of techno programming, I would have already done it. I couldn’t even FIND the fields to work with. So I went looking again, and found two rows of code that looked promising and I posted an update to my question:

So I found picture. tpl, and the refs to description include:

data-description=”{$thumbnail.DESCRIPTION}”

in two places. I could change that to $thumbnail.NAME. That would be telling it that the description never gets displayed, I think, just that the field will be the name/title field. It also exists in index.TPL

Although perhaps I’d be better off trying it as “data-description=”{$thumbnail.NAME}” & “{$thumbnail.DESCRIPTION}” ??

My thought was either to change the template to always show just the TITLE field in both album and picture pages, OR to do a little replacement code to tell it that when it went to display the description, to just first copy the text from the TITLE into it. So either show the title or copy the title into the description and then show the description. Either way, the title would show. Or so I thought. Turns out I was TOTALLY off-base.

The text below the main image is set in [Github] piwigo-bootstrap-darkroom file template/picture.tpl@L38

No idea why the variable is called $COMMENT_IMG, but it’s the description. If you replace the two $COMMENT_IMGs with $current.TITLE it should do what you want for now.

The data-description stuff is for the PhotoSwipe slideshow.

Of course. The title / description is called COMMENT. Which are not to be confused with the actual comment fields. While the TITLE field means something else. Why didn’t I figure that out on my own? 🙂

Who cares in the end? Not me, cuz I made the tweaks and damned if it didn’t work EXACTLY the way I wanted it to do. Fan-freaking- tastic! No more entering the captions twice. Whew!

Now I still had to set captions for about 10,000 photos, and while some of those were done in batches (i.e. multiple photos with the exact same caption like “Small deer at Parc Omega”), others were variations on a theme (“Day 06 – Trip to Cozumel – Water park” or “Day 06 – Trip to Cozumel – Lighthouse”). Others were individual. A fair amount of work.

The last two things I had to do before each album was ready was to test all the photos and videos to make sure they display or play properly (once in a while, a video wouldn’t play, or I had audio but no video, or the picture was upside down), and then, when all was ready, choose an image from the batch to serve as the image for the album cover.

Generate thumbnails, sort the photos, fix the captions, test the viewing, and choose a cover image. It went a lot faster than I initially thought, but it could not be done quickly or in the background. I had some decent processes in place for a good workflow, but it still required me to do a lot of the grunt work manually.

I finally finished after about two months of work, doing a few albums at a time.


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#50by50 #23 Part 5 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Populating

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on February 15, 2018 by PolyWoggApril 26, 2018  

In my previous posts, I talked about the desire to switch from paying for a commercial photo gallery and instead hosting it on my own site; testing out a bunch of plugins and options to embed the photo gallery directly into my WordPress site (i.e. this blog) rather than hosting separately; figuring out problems with Piwigo plugins to make sure I could get it to work with photos AND video together; and finally working through a bunch of options around theme choices and a challenge with my layouts.

Generally, after all that, it puts me in the world of having a working gallery. Or more accurately, a shell of a gallery. I still have to populate it. This is going to fall into four main phases, and it isn’t exactly “light” work. It is pure, unadulterated grunt duty.

Phase 1: Upload my files

Sure, upload my files. Sounds easy enough, right? But we’re not talking about a click-and-upload solution with one fell swoop. There are some options to do that, but it does mean spending a lot of time to either set up a separate set of files (my stored photos on my harddrive go chronologically, and includes subfolders both for photos I want to upload and subfolders for the “also ran” pics that are either duplicates of other shots, or someone is squinting, or whatever). I do occasionally go back to them looking for good shots where, say, Jacob looks awesome in the photo, but I need to crop out two other people. Not worth the effort for a standard upload, but if I was looking for a good shot of JUST Jacob, then I’ll look through the extra photos too. Which means unlike some ruthless digiterati, I don’t just delete those extra shots. To give you an idea of volume, some of my uploads in a year might be 1000 photos over the course of multiple weddings, trips, day to day events, etc. But that likely represents 3000-4000 photos and videos in total. Call it 1 in 3 or 4 that are good enough to share. Why does that matter? Because I can’t just click a single folder and upload everything in it. 75% of the photos don’t get uploaded, so it’s a bit more manual of a process. They’re all presorted, I’m not redoing that work, but it isn’t as simple as clicking a root folder and uploading everything under it.

I downloaded DigiCam as a photo manager as it has an option for uploading photos directly, but it was only marginally better than doing it by hand in a web browser, with a couple of bad work process things too (dangers of “synching” and losing stuff).

So I’m uploading. Since I’m going back to 2005, plus I have other types of photos in there (memes, comics, HR charts, a few other things that only I can see for work purposes), it will likely top out somewhere around 10K photos and videos by the time I’m done. Stored in approximately 250-400 subfolders, depending on how I organize them.

It will take time.


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#50by50 #23 Part 4 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Test Piwigo themes

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on February 6, 2018 by PolyWoggApril 26, 2018  

In my previous post, I was working my way through Piwigo themes but mainly trying to fix a couple of plugin problems for sticky caches and metadata crashing my site. But the main focus of my attention was on choosing an actual theme.

Testing Piwigo – Themes

Did you see in the previous posts where I mentioned there were 47 available themes? Yep, I tried them all. Just to narrow it down to a hopefully small handful that I can work with, for a basic design that isn’t too intrusive and that I can get to work with multiple layouts as needed.

I know I’m going to end up mucking with the template to increase font sizes, but other than that, I’m hoping NOT to play with any setups for colours nor actual font choices. I want the chosen theme to be as close to final as possible. The batch of templates for “no” was relatively straightforward, and for multiple reasons:

  • Too dark: Templates called “Dark”, “Flop_Mauve”, “Grum Dark II”, “Luciano Amodio”, “Mont Blanc XL”, “Pure_grey_plastic”, “Simple Dark”, “Simple / Simple_grey”, and “Stripped and columns / stripped black bloc”;
  • Errors in display (video, photo page or main): “Elegant”, “Elegant_slick”, “Stripped”, “Stripped_responsive”, and SimpleNG (no admin.tools display); and,
  • Problems with layout: “Bootstrap” (banner alignment), “HR_Glass_XL” (basic for photo page), “HR_OS” and “HR_OS_XL” (bit small, too grey), “OS_Glass / OS_Glass_Clear / OS_Glass_dark / OS_Glass_Dark_2” (dark, with confusing photo page), “Kardon” (nice colours but photo page has odd layout), “Modus” (menu layouts too close together), “SakuraBW” (dark, with fonts and sizes too small), and “Versa” (messed up photo page, strange layouts overall, and dark).

Some others were okay, but the colours were just off for me:

  • Grey dragon — lots of power, but one option is too dark and one is too glaringly white;
  • Pure_freaky — too strong a background;
  • Pure_green_nature — too light of colour of green, and the colour of the links is harsh;
  • Pure_TR_green_nature — background too distracting;
  • Simple Sunset – dark, but interesting colour of orange for the links;
  • Simple white — nice layout for EXIF data (to the right, like a sidebar), rest of the layouts and colours were ho hum; and,
  • SmartPocket — mobile theme, which I think is overkill if I can find a simple layout design that is more ubiquitous.

One of the more interesting ones was Wipi. Strange colours, interesting use of ASCII lines, etc. It looks like it was designed by someone obsessed with ASCII graphics, or maybe the old Space Invaders, but too eclectic and dark for my tastes. Interesting, but no.

Contenders for the theme

In the end, I am left with eight possible themes that would work for my needs, with four strong candidates and four backups. The four strong candidates are “Clear”, P0W0″, “Pure_Autumn”, and “Pure_clear_blue”; the four backups are “BlancMontXL”, “Pure_sky”, “Pure_TR_Clear_Blue”, and “Vertical_White”. Let’s see how they do, starting with the backups.

A. BlancMont XL

This one is dark, which I would normally say no to immediately. There are three reasons though that I would consider it. First, a dark theme works well with astronomy photos, and I’m hoping that area of photography will grow for me in the future. Secondly, it is a pretty slick theme. Nice lines, simple layout, and the configuration is pretty basic. In fact, there are only five options — four to include a page banner on the home page, categories page, picture page, and other pages, and one to use the MontBlancXL icon set. Finally, it has a horizontal menu instead of a sidebar layout. Which makes it possible, but not likely.

B. Pure_sky

This one goes the opposite way from the previous. Light, a medium blue background overall, with clouds dotting the top. The traditional sidebar is there to the left. And that’s not configurable. Which is understandable as there are NO configuration options at all in fact. If you want to tweak anything, you have to start messing with the template. Many of the layouts I looked at want to put a frame around the picture near the end, either directly or through background shifts (i.e. like a zone for photos to separate it from the rest of the template). This one doesn’t, it’s just the photo on a plain blue background. Which works well. It’s a viable option, particularly as it has very low overhead at the top of the theme so the photos show up pretty high up…if you set them to medium or potentially even large, there will be no need to scroll as you go from pic to pic. But again, a bit basic. One thing that does differentiate it from the first one though is the first used a small portion of the screen (limited width), whereas this is fully expansive.

C. Pure_TR_clear_blue

Based on the same layouts and default settings as the “Pure” series, this one is identical to Pure_sky. The only difference is a lighter blue background, with some grey colouring, and no “sky” / “clouds” at the top. A little blander version, but perfectly fine choice if I don’t want the clouds.

D. Vertical white

This layout is quite similar to the Pure Themes, but it goes with some slight tweaks. The background is white, and it’s a bit jarring to have all that white space. Looks fine when the video is at full size or with a horizontal pic at max size, but on a large monitor, not the greatest. Plus the colours of the sidebars is a bit odd (green headings?). I can tweak a bit, but why bother? The Pure ones are closer to where I want to be.

If I had to go with one of the backups, I would choose one of the two Pure themes, just with decision as to whether I want the clouds or not. Probably not. So Pure_TR_Clear_Blue it would be.

For the strong contenders, let’s go through them in the same way.

E. Pure_clear_blue

Also based on the “pure” series, this is identical in functionality and layout to B and C above, just with different colours. The overall background is a light grey, almost dirty white. I eliminated the Grey Dragon theme in the first area because it’s background was shockingly white…this tones down all that white space, and I like it. The blue for the menu bars is almost a light pastel, bordering on grey. Again, a very crisp and clear layout, simple colours, and a better fit than B and C.

F. Clear

The layout is clean, with white and muted blues, very simple. It looks VERY similar to the Pure themes, and in the end, it is a toss up between the previous and this one, very minor questions of colour choices.

My choice so far

At this point, if I had to choose, it would be tough. E & F are better than A-D, so that eliminates the backups. Between the two of Pure Clear Blue and Clear, it’s only minor differences, and I would probably want to ask my wife for some input. Mostly though it’s about dancing on the head of a pin between two very similar themes. It’s the next two where it gets difficult.

G. P0W0

I love this theme, and I can’t entirely decide why. The layout is also very clean and simple, like six of the other seven contenders. In fact, it looks and acts like the rest of the Pure themes. But where the colours went different is where I get confused. I wanted light, right? Well, you can’t get much lighter than the lightest blue, light grey or white, which are all available in the first six contenders. But then I hit this one, the overall separation bars go for dark blue, with a lighter almost purple / mauve tint to the background, and the side bars are darker too. Not “dark” blue, but darker than the other options. But it is crisp and clean, good lines, and I like the colour contrast. In fact, if I went with this option, there are only two things I would want to change — a slight increase in font size for the various texts and perhaps an option to add a banner to the overall header.

So following the logic I’ve laid out so far, I should have a clear winner. Crisp. Clean. Simple. Low overhead. Good colour choices, not dark but not glaringly white either.

H. Pure_autumn

This is the one that confuses me completely, and I think it is because the person who designed it and chose the colours did such a great job of choosing fantastic complementary colours. Sure, of the set of eight, this has the nicest non-bland colour combos, and has been at the top of my list previously.

It goes with a light grey for a background, avoiding the white.

It adds a tree in light grey silhouette, with most of the leaves gone (autumn, get it?).

In the footer, to the right, it goes with a darker grey pile of leaves falling in front and trees in the back.

For the side bar, it goes with multiple shades of soft browns, puce, green, yellow, etc.

It is a great theme. I admire its elegance, I admire the craftsmanship. And there is no doubt that it is a better-looking theme than my previous six (the dark one is a totally different beast).

And yet, I can’t pull the trigger on it. I just don’t feel like the colours are “true” matches with my photos. If I was doing more portfolio stuff, sure, I could add the artistic flare for certain nature shots. But for the average batch of photos, the colours just don’t work.

Where that leaves me

Drum roll please….we have a winner! P0W0 is my choice.

But the saying about the “best laid plans of mice and men” comes to mind. I checked the format with my wife, made some tweaks, it all seemed good. Right up until I started editing some info in the template. I was fine with the colours, and basic layout, so that was good. The fonts were a bit small, yet easy to go into LocalFilesEditor and change the CSS a bit. Then when I was changing the Description of one of my photos, I noticed something odd. There are three active “fields” that present me with the opportunity for captions:

a. The filename — I know, I know, it usually doesn’t have anything descriptive in it, so it looks more like IMAGE_0027.JPG for example. But I *could* rename it “Skating on the canal #01”, 02, 03, 04, for example. I prefer to leave the original filename as untouched as possible, but it’s an option;

b. The title — Piwigo calls it “Title” in the internal editing, or “name” on some of the popups. When I uploaded the pictures, it put the filename there as the default. It kind of needs SOMETHING for a name, I’m not sure you can leave it blank. On the thumbnails page, it shows this field as a caption under each photo (at least in most themes) but on the photo page, it moves to the breadcrumb row; and,

c. The description — this only appears on the final photo page, and shows up under the photo.

Which basically means that if I like having “captions” below the photo, then here’s my dilemma:

  • if I put the caption in the filename, it never shows up;
  • if I put the caption in the title/name, it shows up on the thumbnails page in the right spot, under the photo (yay!), but on the photo page, it moves to the breadcrumb (boo); and,
  • if I put the caption in the description, it shows up on the photo page in the right spot, under the photo (yay), but on the thumbnails page, it doesn’t show up at all (boo).

End result? I either have to not have a caption on one of the two areas, have a stupid caption in one of the areas (looking like a filename), or put the caption in BOTH the title/name and description. Double the work, double the pain.

Or…maybe…I could edit the P0W0 theme to put the title or description in both the Thumbnail and Photo pages under the photo? Maybe not. It appears that is based on the core PHP files of Piwigo, it’s not a separate template (TPL) file. Well, crud.

Sooooo, since I want to do something other than entering the captions twice for each photo, what if I took a DIFFERENT theme, one that would allow me extra configurations, and then edit their CSS to change the colours to look like P0W0? In other words, what if I took a theme I rejected (previous post) as being too dark / weird / unusual, or colours (above) but which puts captions in the right place, and then I could just focus on fixing the colour parts I don’t like?

Worth a consideration, at least, right?

Re-testing themes for titles/descriptions

All of the PURE themes were out, right from the start. Like P0W0, there is no real config and it puts everything the same place P0W0 does. So no help there. Nine themes down. Other themes with the same problem include: Clear; Dark; 3 x HR; 5 x OS; Kardon; Grum_dark_II; Sakura_BW; 5 x Simple; Sylvie; Versa; Vertical_white; Wipi; SmartPocket; BlancMontXL; MontblancXL; and Modus.

Elegant and Elegant_slick were different…it got rid of the thumbnail page, and put it under the photo as a carousel/slide row. The Description went ABOVE the photo (not under), but each of the little thumbnails had both title and description on them when you ran the mouse over. Interesting, they had some other basic configs but meh.

Flopmauve + Luciano  also merged title and description on the thumbnails page (which would mean I could use one or the other) but it was only on mouseover.

GreyDragon takes a very different approach to layouts, and uses tabs for lots of things. Not entirely sold on it, but it comes with a HUGE set of configurable options. Lots of good things in there, none of which solves my caption problem, at least not without mouseovers or popups.

The three Stripped themes weren’t all created equal, and if I dumped the responsive and columns one, the remaining “default” one was actually great for solving the problem — on the config settings, there was a clear option to specify what to put below the photo — a caption of the Title/name field or the Description field. Perfect, right? Except it messed up the album and thumbnail pages, and no matter what I did to them, I couldn’t get it off a pre-set five columns per page layout.

Which leaves me either sticking with P0WO or going with Bootstrap Darkroom. Bootstrap Darkroom? Yeah, it actually comes the closest. And with a bit of tweaking, I got the colours and layouts looking correct. I didn’t find any solution in the template other than pasting the info twice (title and description), but it’s working. Mostly though I just couldn’t resist the ExIf sidebar for the layout.

I have a theme. I’m relatively good to go.


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#50by50 #23 Part 3 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Test Piwigo

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on February 6, 2018 by PolyWoggApril 26, 2018  

In my previous two posts, I talked about the history of my approach to having an online photo gallery with videos, ranging from self-hosted with embedded videos to a full commercial account with SmugMug, and the desire to repatriate the files back to my main website. WordPress didn’t have much in the way of working options, and so I moved on to Piwigo again.

Testing Piwigo – the configuration

Piwigo is a standalone app that Softaculous installs pretty well from scratch on my host, no muss, no fuss. And I’ve used it before with a fair amount of success — I had it up and running with 3000+ photos and videos at one point, so it must have met my needs. I installed it on my site again, chose all the basic plugins that I used about three years ago, tweaked the basics, and uploaded three photos and a video as test subjects.

The video played perfectly, right out of the gate. The photos weren’t anything to write home about, but I was just testing it. Next up would be my theme selection, and then I would go back and do a full tweak of all the plugins, menus and settings. I tried one or two themes, all good. I was pretty sure where I would end up, but it’s been three years, maybe something else would catch my eye in the tweaks since then.

I tried a theme called BootStrap, decided it was too dark, went back to a clear theme, and my site CRASHED. It would NOT load the main page anymore. I could get into the administration pages on the back-end, but it would NOT show me the front page. It was throwing errors on my theme. But I was using the default theme I had used earlier…could the other theme have corrupted my install? How? That’s weird.

So I did what every good administrator does. I deactivated all my plugins, reinstalled the themes, and checked the main page. Voila, no problem, it loads. Problem solved, right?

Nope, I reactivated a couple of plugins, and it crashed again. A plugin called Admin.Tools was causing the conflict and was crashing the site. The plugin has been around for ages, tested and used by thousands, always worked, and now it was CONFLICTING? It worked fine fifteen minutes before. I started searching online to see if anyone else had a problem with Admin.Tools and found someone who did. It was slightly different from mine, but they were mostly getting the same error. Activate Admin.Tools, and the template was missing. But it couldn’t be missing, it looked like a conflict. Hmm. Okay, I deactivated it, tested a few other things.

And suddenly my VIDEOS WOULDN’T LOAD. I don’t mean they wouldn’t play, I mean I couldn’t even LOAD the PAGE they were on where I would press play. WTF? It was LITERALLY working just TEN MINUTES BEFORE! GRRRRRR. I searched online for the new error message, and while lots of people seemed to get the same error occasionally, their situation was very different from mine.

I posted the full details on the Piwigo forum and hoped for the best. Maybe someone would know why, and more importantly, be able to tell me if completely blowing it off the system and reinstalling it was worth a shot.

Piwigo problem with Admin.Tools

I was getting the following error in Piwigo:

Warning: include(/themeconf.inc.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/polywogg/public_html/pandafamily/include/template.class.php on line 1156

Warning: include(): Failed opening ‘/themeconf.inc.php’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/opt/alt/php70/usr/share/pear’) in /home/polywogg/public_html/pandafamily/include/template.class.php on line 1156

Fatal error: Uncaught –> Smarty: Unable to load template file ‘menubar.tpl’ <– thrown in /home/polywogg/public_html/pandafamily/include/smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_internal_template.php on line 139

On the forum, a local genius named Flop25 who has helped i.e. saved me in the past and often goes above and beyond the call of duty suggested that instead of doing a completely new install, I could just re-upload some key files over top of the existing install, a little easier. He also suggested that it looked like a problem finding the template, perhaps due to a caching problem.

Which got me thinking. A caching problem? Missing template? It wasn’t a conflict? Hmm…wait a minute. Admin.Tools lets you switch between themes easily on the front end so you can see what the various themes look like live. But it has a sticky setting. Just because I change something on the backend, the Admin.Tools remembers what the last theme chosen was on the front end. And shows you that. Which in this case would have been something like BootStrap. Which I tried, didn’t like, deactivated, and then, DELETED. Except Admin.Tools was keeping the sticky setting. It was trying to load the BootStrap template even though the backend had changed to the default CLEAR template. And since I had deleted the one it was TRYING to use, it was just giving an error message. Which also meant I couldn’t see the page to switch to a different theme.

I tried the page without Bootstrap but with Admin.Tools installed, and it crashed. I reinstalled Bootstrap, went to the main page, and this time it worked no problem. I switched the theme to CLEAR, went back to theme management, deactivated Bootstrap, and deleted it. Went back to the main page, it still worked no problem.

If Flop25 hadn’t mentioned the caching issue i.e. it was looking for something old, not something that was now missing / conflicted / corrupted, I never would have though of it. I just needed to reinstall the missing theme, switch the semi-sticky option in Admin.Tools to something else, and then it was all good.

Piwigo problem with Video.JS

My second problem was a bit more elusive. I said I had video working previously, now it wasn’t. I wondered if perhaps my host had told me I could use video but then their internal systems spotted it and shut it down. Maybe I really couldn’t use video after all and they had changed the configuration. But I tried it in WordPress and it still worked. It just wasn’t working in Piwigo. But I had already solved the theme problem, and so it wasn’t that. Weird.

Basically, here’s the error message I was receiving:

Mediainfo error reading file.

Is MediaInfo install? Is MediaInfo in path?

Is the video accessible & readable, Try to run the command manually.

 
I read through a bunch of stuff online, and it seemed like somehow Piwigo couldn’t see MediaInfo anymore (a server tool that reads the info on the video file). But it had worked previously, so WTF? I hadn’t changed ANYTHING that would affect that, just themes. And while I thought the theme had corrupted something, it actually hadn’t. It was just a sticky cache.

I didn’t know what the exact problem was, but in the meantime, I could work around it. I was thinking I might try Flop25’s partial reinstallation at some point, so I went onward in my testing to try all the available themes. There are 47 in total available, and while I wasn’t hopeful for any of the dark ones (I prefer lighter backgrounds), some of them have a lighter option hidden in them. So I was working my way through them, one by one.

Basically this means that I would load the new theme, look at the main page, an album page, and a photo page, and see what everything looked like for layout and colours, menu links, etc. I was about 75% of the way through, and something weird happened. I went to the photo page that had the one video on it, and it loaded. No problem at all. It was suddenly working again. But I hadn’t changed anything except the themes.

So of course I initially thought it must be a theme issue. And I had found one that worked. Cool!

So I tried another that was in my “likely for consideration” file that I had already tried, and the video worked in it too. Wait. It didn’t work a minute ago in there, and now it does. That’s NOT a theme issue, but theme is the only thing I changed, wasn’t it? Well, not exactly.

Because when I was on the pages with individual photos, and checking layouts, I had toggled the “INFO” button. For photos, it shows you EXIF data about your photo. I’m not entirely sure I want that data always showing, but having an option is good. Except when I had it toggled ON and I went to the video, the page crashed. When I toggled it OFF, and I went to the video, it worked.

Son of a biscuit.

Apparently I need to learn how to read better. The error message was literally telling me that it couldn’t read the MEDIAINFO — not the media itself, but the info about the media. Basically its metadata. But everyone online was talking about it being unable to read the file when it got that error OR that the MediaInfo app wasn’t loading. But that’s not accurate. It can find and read the file, it just can’t parse the metadata for some reason.

Which made me think, okay, maybe the reason is irrelevant, all I have to do is choose between EXIF for all and no video, or no EXIF but my video would work. Unless…wait a second…didn’t I see a second plugin for EXIF data, maybe it can help. No, that’s to GET the data. I need to block it.

Oh look. In the VIDEO.JS config page, there is an option that says:

METADATA

Show file metadata : Yes No (METADATA_DESC)

I had it set to YES. Maybe that was the default, maybe I set it there because I thought it would be useful. But I turned it off, and now, it doesn’t matter what the page toggle says or not. The page doesn’t try to read the media info / meta data, so it doesn’t throw an error message, and it doesn’t crash. The video files are working again. Yay! And the photos can still have ExIf info if I want.

Which means after some slight testing of my plugins and setups, I’m ready to find a working Piwigo theme. Onward, digital soldier!

 


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#50by50 #23 Part 2 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Test WordPress galleries

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on February 6, 2018 by PolyWoggApril 26, 2018  

In my previous post, I talked about the various approaches I have taken to hosting my photo gallery online — self-hosted, merged with Vimeo / DailyMotion / Youtube for videos, and then SmugMug. But I’ve always wanted to re-patriate the files to my main server, and my new hoster will let me do that now. Sign me up! Oh, wait, I’m already signed up!

Oh, wait

The “oh wait” moment was that I realized that I don’t have a good solution anymore for managing galleries and videos on my site. I had a separate install of Piwigo, and it caused a huge load problem with my old hosting solution. Except I realized looking back, it didn’t. It was a plugin in WP that caused the problem, and I had it again with WP on the NEW hoster later. But they were able to fix it. It wasn’t Piwigo. So I could go with Piwigo again (a full separate software install, not just added to WordPress). Or I could try finding a fully integrated solution within WordPress itself.

Lots of people run photo sites with WP as the engine. I’ve tried it in the past, even paid for some apps to try the full version when the trial version looked promising. But I’ve never found a great solution for me. It was worth a try again, but I would have three giant caveats.

First and foremost, it couldn’t mess up my media library. WordPress has a media library where it keeps your uploaded pics and videos. The default version doesn’t have much in the way of abilities to quickly sort or manipulate groups of files, so the last thing I want is 5000 pics and videos all in one little library. Whatever solution I use has to have an ability to create separate media libraries or galleries, or at least allow me to categorize and manipulate them in smaller groups.

Second, it has to handle video. There’s no real point in installing a picture gallery if I can’t manage the videos too — that’s the whole reason I struggled previously. I don’t want to keep doing it manually. If I had to do that, I might as well leave it with SmugMug.

Third, the plugin has to work relatively simply and seamlessly. Some of the ones in the past have had really complicated taxonomies, or hierarchies that made no real sense. I’m not talking simply counter-intuitive, I mean completely backwards logic. Photos go in albums, albums go in sets, sets might form a gallery. The words come from the physical world. But lots of programmers have inverted those taxonomies to put images in sets that go in galleries that then go in albums(???) at the top of the hierarchy. WTF?

If it isn’t making my life easier, and those are the three criteria, I might as well pass. So I decided to give ten plugins a try in WordPress and see how it would go.

A. NextGen

This is the most popular gallery in WordPress, hundreds of thousands of users. And I have NEVER been able to get it to work reliably. It’s possible it conflicts with my theme choice, although I’m not sure why. It’s powerful, and it doesn’t mess up the media library. I hear its logic is stable, understandable and works. I don’t know. Because this time around, all I got was the white screen of death — it apparently conflicts with the security plugin I’m using, which blocks part of its pop-up screens for creating galleries. And while I could dance on the head of a pin to make it work, it won’t handle videos anyway. Strike.

B. Photo Gallery by Web Dorado

This one is also popular, and while I wasn’t sure how it was handling the media library or workflows, in the end, it didn’t matter — it handles video only by embeds from other sites (like YouTube), it won’t handle directly-hosted i.e. uploaded videos. Foul ball, strike two.

C. Envira

I feel a bit harsh on this one. From my perspective, Envira is basically crippleware. It says it can and will do all sorts of wonderful things. Which you can try by buying “this” plugin along with “that” addon. Strike three. One batter out.

D. FooGallery

At this point in the process, I’m looking at plugins that have over 50K users using them, and FG seemed promising for video and workflows. Except it completely messed up the internal media library. Strike one.

E. Huge IT Image Gallery

Like Envira, it has limited options without a bunch of other plugins, and no video. Strike two.

F. Portfolio Gallery

I was hopeful for this one, as it had video options, but like the Photo Gallery by Web Dorado, it only shows embedded videos, not directly-hosted. Strike three, second batter out.

G. Photo Gallery by Supsystic

Of all the galleries, I think this one was the coolest. It has a round layout, and the photos looked awesome in it. I don’t know if I would want it for all photos in my gallery, but as an option, it looked good. But it was tied into the existing media library, and it could only show videos that were already posted / embedded. Strike one.

H. Gallery by bestwebsoft

I was feeling a bit desperate at this point. I had worked my way through all the big names in photo galleries in the repository, and was now down to plugins with less than 50K users. Not looking hopeful at this point, and this one was no different. Pretty basic, and it was integrated with the existing media library. Never even got to figure out workflows or if it would handle video. Strike two.

I. Existing commercial galleries

As I mentioned, I had tried some commercial galleries previously. Social Gallery plugin was one that I tried a couple of years ago when I was hosting the videos elsewhere, and I thought at the time that I would try to just embed them. Except it has no real video options. Foul ball.

I also tried Global Gallery aka WordPress Responsive Gallery, but it too had no video options. Another foul ball.

The most promising one from the past was one called DZS Video Gallery. It has ways to handle locally hosted videos, it is separate from the media library and while a bit raw for workflow, I liked it enough previously to buy andgive the full version a try. Except it never worked. I couldn’t get it configured correctly previously, and the creator offered to fully log in to my site to get it configured properly if I just gave him my full login and password, serving info, maybe the name of my first pet or parent’s middle name. Yeah, it sounded sketchy. Maybe he was on the up and up, but after buying something that he swore worked out of the box, and given I have a relatively vanilla install, the fact that it wasn’t working was not creating much in the way of trust. I just couldn’t get it to integrate and play, and I wasn’t willing to hand over admin privileges to someone halfway around the world that I didn’t know. I tried to get a refund at the time, but no luck. Live and learn, right? Anyway, I tried it again since I already own it, updated the download, still didn’t work.

Strike three, WordPress is out! Or was it?

While WP wasn’t working with standalone gallery plugins, or at least not easily, I didn’t give up on it. I tried a bunch of other plugins that allowed me to manage my media library in different ways, essentially letting JetPack and WordPress handle my gallery on their own, but it was either too manual or didn’t integrate with video. In the end, some of the galleries were pretty good looking, but I just needed another solution, preferably a better one too.


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#50by50 #23 Part 1 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Introduction

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on February 6, 2018 by PolyWoggApril 26, 2018  

Among my 50by50 goals, I have a series of inter-related ones called “get my sh** together”. Since those don’t look very nice as page titles, I’ve tweaked it a bit to make it a little more family-friendly (my son, Jacob, age 8, does read my blog, so I should clean up my act). And one thing that has annoyed me on the digital front for a very long time is my online photo gallery.

I won’t bore you with the long version of its sordid history, but the short rant is that I have a website (polywogg.ca) that I pay to host. And so I have my own domain, my own file area, relatively unlimited file storage related to the website (i.e. I can’t turn it into a cloud server, but for the purposes of a website, it’s open season). So I should be able to have a gallery for my personal pictures and video clips. But when it comes to video, almost all the basic hosters have the same limitation.

No hosting video.

If you want to have video on the site, you generally have to upload it to Vimeo or DailyMotion or Youtube (with the ownership and advertisement and privacy issues, oh my, that go along with these sites), and then link to it from your site by embedding the link in your post. It works really well, don’t get me wrong, but dealing with those video sites is a pain in the patootie. A few years ago, I was putting the videos in a password protected area of Vimeo or Dailymotion (I don’t even remember now which one it was), and linking them to a web gallery on my server, running Piwigo as the photo gallery with video embeds. It was working okay, I uploaded about 3000 photos, and then I ran into a problem with the hoster. They claimed it was Piwigo, and after a bunch of testing, frustration, and failure, I eventually killed the Piwigo site and moved everything — photos and video — to SmugMug. Like Flickr and others, it allows you to upload personal photos and videos and then share them. There are basic accounts that are free, but I would have quickly overwhelmed those limits, so I bit the bullet — and paid $80 / year to host everything at SmugMug.

Overall, it’s been great. It took me a while to get up and running, but eventually, I had it all working, so all good. Except it has still been costing me $80 a year when I’m *already paying to host a website elsewhere*. Grrr…oh, and about ten months ago, my workplace updated their firewall blacklist and SmugMug was on it (to prevent people streaming video to the office and sucking up bandwidth) — so when I do blog posts and paste pics from the site, the pics don’t show up in my articles when viewed from work or some other government sites. Which means some of my posts about HR that have pics in them don’t show properly. It has been on my list to fix, but a pain in the patootie to find an alternative, as the most likely alternative is finding somewhere where I could host everything. A new hoster, perhaps. There’s a small chicken-and-egg loop in there, move the site or move the pics, and I’ve not bothered to fix it.

As I said, most basic hosters don’t allow video. They are afraid because video can drastically suck their bandwidth, which they can’t afford to do on basic sites at basic rates. And they don’t want to charge someone $5 / month and have them start streaming movies and trailers for the masses. Except that’s not what I’m doing. I have a few personal videos per month that when posted might get watched by up to five or six people, and then it will sit dormant most of the time. Low bandwidth, nothing major. I know that, the hosters don’t, so they have general policies that say “no video” and they block it internally on the site for all their hosting accounts.

So imagine my surprise recently when I tried a video on my WordPress site and it not only uploaded, stored and loaded on a page, it actually played. WTF? It isn’t blocked? But I know it violates the general terms of service, so I contacted them and asked the question. Maybe I pay them a bit more each month or year so I could host a bit of low bandwidth video on my site? I’m paying SmugMug $80 a year; anything less than that, or potentially even a little more with it fully integrated with my website, and I’d be in digital heaven.

Their response? No extra charge, as long as it is low bandwidth, go ahead. Hallelujah and pass the upload app!


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Averting disaster with my music files

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on March 28, 2017 by PolyWoggJanuary 8, 2019  

One of my goals for this year was to improve some of my digital setup. Some of that is for photography, some of it is for astronomy, a few other things here and there, but the three big “techno” areas for me this year are my laptop/writing setup, my TV subscriptions / antenna options, and my audio files. Namely, my music collection in digital form.

I’ve been delaying a deep dive into the world of MP3 management for some time, partly as I’ve been burned before. Several times, I thought that I had found a solution, everything seemed to be working, I was making some progress, and then BAM! The app stopped being supported. Or I had a crash and lost a bunch of work. Not the actual music files themselves, I’m pretty good at backing them up, but having a good file structure with a good management program and a player? Not so much.

I used to love programs like WinAmp. Simple interface, could handle the synch with my iPod well, heck it even would synch with a Sony Walkman (yes, they used the name for a small line of MP3 players at one point too, and because it is small, lightweight and functional, I still use it as my music player of choice when portability is the main factor). I almost never use my phone or tablet for music playback as it is just a license to suck battery life. I’ve struggled with ripping from time to time, finding a good setup, good parameters that didn’t produce overly large file sizes that I wouldn’t notice the benefit of cuz I have basic system for playback and no real discerning ability with my ears. I have an old boss that has more money tied up in high-end audio WIRING then I have in my entire stereo collection.

But I was determined to do it right. Now, just to be clear, I wasn’t looking for a perfect solution, nor even a solution to a “problem” per se, I was just wanting to update my approach, maybe find some baby steps that I could take. Wow, was I in for a surprise.

50,000 reasons to hate iTunes

While I was starting to figure out how I wanted to sort my library with as few “layers” as possible, I updated iTunes just to keep it up to date. It is after all a good store. I had pushed everything over there in my last go around about 18 months ago, and I had decided pretty much at the time to go all in on iTunes, right up until I noticed a couple of files seemed to “change” quality and size after I synched with iTunes. It seemed odd, so I started looking at it more closely. In addition, in one case, iTunes even changed the filenames of two files — assigning the song name for Track 7 to Track 8, and visa versa. Weirdness in naming and how did some of the files shrink? WTF?

I then starting looking around online and found out that iTunes has a unique little feature. By default, when you synch, if it finds the file in its library, it doesn’t “upload” and save your copy. No, it just uses its copy (to save bandwidth and file size). No biggie, right? Except it then goes a step further in the synch and REPLACES your copy with the file from its database since it knows it is safe and sanitized. Which isn’t a huge deal if the files were the same…except they weren’t. I had ripped at a higher quality than the iTunes version, so my files were originally larger, and now they were “downgraded” to a lower quality and smaller size. Would I notice? Probably not when actually listening, I don’t have an audiophile’s ear nor the equipment. You can turn the setting off with a little tweaking, if you know to even look for it, but the default is to replace all existing files with the iTunes version. I found a few horror stories online where someone had some specific backups of old recordings that got replaced by iTunes with no warning or notification, and after a couple of subsequent backups not knowing there was anything wrong with the originals, their backups were now just the iTunes version. Bye bye sweet memories, hello commercial pablum. While these problems stood out, there were lots of other quirks people had found and posted online, and it made nervous enough to want to manage my music files myself without an auto-synch taking over. I manage my ebooks the same way — myself with my own software, not Amazon’s or Kobo’s or Nook’s, etc.

So my commitment to iTunes was done, and it slowed my music-organizing work in 2015. I tried Music Bee, but it wasn’t really jiving for me, and I eventually completed stalled. Until this past week, when I got back into it. I checked the iTunes install, and now it was REALLY weird. While I had some 3500 files stored in the iTunes media folders, only 35 were showing up in the actual iTunes app. I had them all in there before. I had done massive work to upload, sort, tweak the meta data, etc. Gone. So my hope of exporting and importing was gone. No biggie, it hadn’t been finished anyway, and I wasn’t sure what I was using now anyway.

Except then I noticed another problem. Those 3500 files. It seemed like a lot, well structured, but there were a few odd things missing. Like Jacob’s kids songs. I had four or five CDs ripped, and they weren’t there. Then I noticed some collections missing from the 1940s and 1950s. WTF? Where are the rest of my music files?

I had told iTunes back in the day that it could have permission to manage my music folders. Which meant it imported everything from another directory that was a bit chaotic. I never noticed at the time, too busy working within iTunes to notice that when it imported it into the directory, it DIDN’T actually complete the job. I knew it hadn’t uploaded everything, and in fact I hadn’t wanted it to until better organized, but I thought it had at least COPIED everything and that it was now all IN the directory. Nope. Not even close. I have another 40K files that just aren’t there. No, not another 40K songs, there’s a lot of chaff in that mix, with lots of duplicates, but probably another 10K active songs. I knew they weren’t in iTunes, like I said, but they should have been in the iTunes media folder. Nada.

Small panic. Maybe they’re elsewhere in the drive? Nope, I cleaned those up LONG ago. Cuz iTunes had them, no worries. Except it didn’t. So I checked my backups…of course, 18 months ago, my backups would have had those secondary directories. But now? I’ve completely rolled over 2 or 3 times since then. So my backup is JUST what iTunes has. Yikes. 50,000 down to 3500? That’s a big reason to hate iTunes a little, even if it isn’t entirely iTunes fault (I should have verified that it copied what I told it to copy!).

Digital packrat

I dug out two old backup drives, ones I’m loathe to just ditch even if they are not part of my regular backup routine now. I loaded them up and started working my way through them. One was relatively empty, easy to wipe and set aside for a future secondary or tertiary backup of some key files (it’s a 500GB drive but requires power, so not simple USB mobile device). The second is a 2TB workhorse. Killed tons of crap that I don’t need anymore, long since improved or reorganized, but then I found my old music files.

They’re relatively a disaster in terms of organization, no question about it. But the extra files are there. Some overlap with what I already have, but surprisingly not as much as I might have thought. What did I find? 3000 folders, 40K of files and 160GB of music related materials. Ah, so that’s why my Music backups didn’t take up as much time or size as I would have expected. I should have twigged to it earlier, but I trusted the wrong app.

Which means I have to copy all of those over, sort them, and figure out what I’m going to do with my new apps.

New apps

I mentioned that I had Music Bee for awhile but it just wasn’t “singing” to me. Then, with a cellphone plan that I have, I got Spotify for free for two years. Instant music, no need to organized, synch, or do anything else. It was just there. Or at least it is there for two years in total, another six months or so. I’m not totally comfortable with subscription based music consumption, partly as I don’t use it anywhere near enough to make it worth it, and at the end, you don’t own anything. It is just “temporary”. Why rent when I can buy?

Except of course I need to rip a lot of stuff, and I want it in a good format so I only do it once. Plus I want to be able to upload it somewhere where I can access it via the web. Oh, and I want to be able to synch to my Walkman, play it on an old tablet connected to my stereo, and just for fun, synch the music to an old iPhone or two. Easy peasy, right? Let’s break it down in order.

For the streaming, it is relatively easy. While there are a number of apps and sites, the three biggest are Spotify, Google Play Music (GPM) and iTunes. I already ditched iTunes, and I already have Spotify but it isn’t doing everything I want nor does it have great options for my own music so much as just using their existing library. Which means those two are not high on my list.

Since I use Google for everything anyway, I started looking pretty heavily at GPM. I can upload up to 50K of my own songs. And then I can stream them. And it’s free. If I want to upgrade to the full streaming system, it is $10 and I can have up to 10 devices. Colour me sold. Why didn’t I do this LONG ago?

So that left me merely with finding a good music manager for my desktop. Most of the big ones would work fine, and most of the real differences between a lot of them are graphical user interface choices. I prefer a simple list layout, something relatively like Windows Explorer even. But the real kicker for me is to where I want to be able to transfer the music. I almost never listen on my PC itself, partly as it is in a shared office with my wife. Instead, I want to be able to transfer it to six separate devices:

  1. My Sony Walkman — as I mentioned, it’s an MP3 player that Sony slapped the Walkman rubrique on for branding, but it is small without being like an Apple nano. Good size, works well, good battery life. I load it up with my music and then it sits on there until I get bored with it and want something else. Not very quick to be changed, I mean. But I want the app to recognize it;
  2. My old iTouch — I have an old iTouch, and I want to be able to just dump a ton of stuff on to it and plug it into my bedside clock radio/stereo. I could stream off of Google Play through my network, but really I just want it to be a physical storage device with direct loading; and,
  3. Andrea’s old iPhone — she has an old iPhone 4 or 5 that had a cracked screen, so I got it repaired with the intention of giving it to Jacob as a simple camera and portable app toy. The synching with iTunes for apps isn’t very functional though, with the software getting a little long in the tooth, so I’m looking at repurposing to be another portable music player. I’m also going to try using it as an underwater camera in one of those sealable pouches, and well, if it dies, no great loss;

The other three are a bit different though as they are three fully functional Android devices, which means I can either stream or synch with them direct.

  1. My phone — I have a 32GB SD card in it, so I could just copy it over. Or I can run the Google Play Music app. It would be great though if I could synch wirelessly with my phone, the way I do to upload my photos when I want to transfer them to the PC;
  2. My big tablet — My newer tablet is wireless, and like my phone, I can either synch the music and carry it with me on the SD card or I can just stream GPM. But either way, it would be great to synch wirelessly with the PC; and,
  3. My old small tablet — I have an older slower Samsung tablet that is basically collecting dust in my office. It isn’t fast, it isn’t fancy, but it still runs everything on Google. So my plan is to copy everything over, either wirelessly or not, and / or install GPM on it, and hook it up to the computer in our family room. Instant stereo feed.

Now, with those six devices in mind, I fully expected I would not be able to do it with one app. I thought, “Okay, one app to synch with the first batch” and hopefully I could find another that would handle the second. Or I could just use GPM to stream it. Except as I was reading online of the top 10 music managers from 2016, I came across Media Monkey again.

Media Monkey

I had seen this app before, back in the day, and I ended up with Music Bee and iTunes. But as I went through a good review over on Tom’s Guide of music managers, I was dropping some of them fast. Won’t synch with iDevices? Gone. Trouble with other MP3 players? Pass.

Wait a second. It says Media Monkey will synch with regular MP3 players AND iDevices? Hold the phones — it will also synch with Android WIRELESSLY? Holy cow, that sounds like the perfect app.

Sure, it’s a bit of a pig for display, a little small here and there, without much opportunity to fix it. The skins are terrible (had to revert to Windows). But it does have a file tree-like view option. Text for the rest. Recognizes my Sony device. Synched wirelessly with my phone.

And if I rename a heading in the music view, it renames the actual folder in the hard drive. Outstanding.

This will bear some careful examination, but I think I’ve found my tool.


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Posted in Computers, Music Review | Tagged apps, computers, goals, library, music, organizing | Leave a reply
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