Lost photos

Jayhem

Hello,

(Sorry if this has come up already, I'm going to dig more into the forums but wanted to get some feedback before more damage gets done)

Obviously I'm quite new on Smugmug. So I've migrated lots of photos from Flickr with that tool (I think it was SmuggLr) that created lots of duplicates, as the same photo could appear in several of my Flickr galleries.

One of the my Smugmug galleries in particular contained photos present in several other galleries, so I deleted all but one photo (the only one that wasn't present in another gallery) from that aggregate gallery, and everything looked better when I browsed by label.

Today however I noticed that the photos I removed are gone from ALL galleries! This means that some of my galleries are now EMPTY and no other copies are left of the photos I thought were duplicates. All my BEST photos are gone and my homepage slideshow is now empty too, although I set it up after removing the duplicates and it looked fine last time I checked.

What's even stranger is that some of the photos I deleted are now back in that aggregate gallery (I'm not 100% sure of what exactly I deleted, but I thought I removed all but one photo in that aggregate gallery, and today it contains more than one photo, including some I'm sure I deleted)

Is there something I fundamentally misunderstood about SmugMug?

So to summarise, what I had a few days ago:
Gallery1: A, B, C
Gallery2: D, E, F
Gallery3: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H
<deleted A, B, C, D, E, F, G from Gallery3>

What should be:
Gallery1: A, B, C
Gallery2: D, E, F
Gallery3: H

What I see today:
Gallery1: <empty>
Gallery2: <empty>
Gallery3: A, D, G, H

I have to point out that the whole SmugMug interface has been feeling very confusing and buggy (in particular on Safari) and i've done this deletion just after the downtime, so I'm not too surprised to see things go wrong. I haven't lost anything I can't replace, except my time (and my patience). I'm probably just going to ask for a refund and look for a more reliable website that doesn't lose the work of its (paying!) customers.

Thanks in advance for any tips.
Jean-Marc

Andy

Jean-Marc, please write our Support Heroes and let us help you directly from the help desk. Thanks!

Jayhem

Andy, thanks for your reply, I've emailed support and linked to this thread.

I wasn't hoping for a 'fix', so I thought a forum post might be more useful.

I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed disappearing photos after the release of the 'smart' galleries. I probably wouldn't have noticed the issue if I wasn't in the process of setting everything up.

As someone who has lots of (truly amazing) photos on SmugMug, do you have a way of making sure all your photos are still there? I'm only an amateur photographer but a professional software developer, so I know that software can never be trusted and requires validation at all levels. Has anyone written a tool to log the content of their smugmug site into a text file (including all the metadata, file names, etc) in order to track the inventory, diff the changes? Maybe SmugVault is the way to go?

Andy

Jayhem wrote:

As someone who has lots of (truly amazing) photos on SmugMug, do you have a way of making sure all your photos are still there?

We're not going to lose your photos
You can see all your photos by trying nickname.smugmug.com/date that's one way to see everything on your site.

lyneius

I have "lost" an entire gallery of photos while adding captions
Hi Jean-Marc,

I just "lost" an entire gallery of photos while updating captions & 'hiding" duds. I saw Andy's post and tried the "/DATE" trick and found them with captions still intact but my gallery says "Empty". I'm awaiting a response from my email hero in hopes of recovering my gallery - it contains ~700 photos.

Jayhem

lyneius, the support heroes seem to be able to recover my deleted photos, so I guess you're going to get yours back too:-)


Andy, thanks for the /date trick, sounds like a good way to get the count of uploaded images.

However, the output pages are corrupted: my deleted ones aren't showing, but there are some 'ghost' images taking some space, as in:
http://jayhem.smugmug.com/date/2009-05-31/2009-05-31

So according to the image count displayed on the /date page, there should be 29 photos for 2009, but when opening that page, there are only 16 displaying, 13 of them are missing.

I'm still wondering how I would be able to manage my whole photo library on Smugmug. How can you be sure if all your photos are _really_ there?

lyneius

Hi Jean-Marc,
Thanks for the reassurance! I've not yet heard back from the support heroes almost 19 hours after sending my email - that's probably an indication that this is a major problem and they are swamped with requests for help and cannot meet their 2 hour response target.

Andy,
It would be nice to get an acknowledgment that the request for help email has been received - even an auto-response would be comforting. If I don't hear back by the 24 hour mark, I'll send another email.

Ann McRae

Hi

I do not see email from you at the help desk. Did you get a reply (perhaps using a different email address?)? If not, please send your question, with links, etc. to us again.

Thanks

ann

lyneius wrote:

Hi Jean-Marc,
Thanks for the reassurance! I've not yet heard back from the support heroes almost 19 hours after sending my email - that's probably an indication that this is a major problem and they are swamped with requests for help and cannot meet their 2 hour response target.

Andy,
It would be nice to get an acknowledgment that the request for help email has been received - even an auto-response would be comforting. If I don't hear back by the 24 hour mark, I'll send another email.

lyneius

Resent email re "lost" gallery
Hi Ann,

I just resent the email via your help website and also from my Thunderbird/gmail system. Hopefully you will get one of them :-)

Ann McRae

lyneius wrote:

Hi Ann,

I just resent the email via your help website and also from my Thunderbird/gmail system. Hopefully you will get one of them :-)

Hi Lyneius
Both emails arrived - and we have replied.

ann

lyneius

Got my "lost photos/empty" gallery back and all is well - Thanks!!!
Hi Ann,

I'd like to thank you and your whole Support Hero team for resolving my "lost photos/empty" gallery problem!
Rich Wilson took a shot at it then
Nick Wrzesinski recovered it by changing the sort.

It was a great Team Effort!

Thanks again!!

Lyneius