Migrating a PBase blog to smugmug
arjunrc
Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
Update Jul 10 2012: This issue is now solved - the pbase galleries have been migrated to Smugmug. See post #21.
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Hi,
I would like to migrate from PBase to Smugmug in a couple of months. I was hoping someone could help me with some questions (and/or point me to the right places to look)
1. Of utmost importance is a 'PBlog' (PBase Blog) gallery that I've maintained since 2007. It has over 900 images with text. I'd like that gallery to be imported to a private gallery in Smugmug. Its critical that the image text is retained (it documents the growing up of my 2 kids, so you can imagine it can't be messed with). Is there an automated way to do this? I don't want to do this manually. IF this needs to be done manually, migrating to Smugmug may not be possible for me
2. I am interesting in setting up a site where I can sell photos. I know the pro version ($150 p/yr) allows me to do it, but does the power acct. prohibit me from setting up my own cart via javascript?
3. If I go for a power version today, can I upgrade to Pro by 'a click of a button' (more or less). I don't want to have to re-organize/redo any part of my acct to enable pro at a later stage (Besides of course specifying pricing etc)
thanks
- - - - original post - - - -
Hi,
I would like to migrate from PBase to Smugmug in a couple of months. I was hoping someone could help me with some questions (and/or point me to the right places to look)
1. Of utmost importance is a 'PBlog' (PBase Blog) gallery that I've maintained since 2007. It has over 900 images with text. I'd like that gallery to be imported to a private gallery in Smugmug. Its critical that the image text is retained (it documents the growing up of my 2 kids, so you can imagine it can't be messed with). Is there an automated way to do this? I don't want to do this manually. IF this needs to be done manually, migrating to Smugmug may not be possible for me
2. I am interesting in setting up a site where I can sell photos. I know the pro version ($150 p/yr) allows me to do it, but does the power acct. prohibit me from setting up my own cart via javascript?
3. If I go for a power version today, can I upgrade to Pro by 'a click of a button' (more or less). I don't want to have to re-organize/redo any part of my acct to enable pro at a later stage (Besides of course specifying pricing etc)
thanks
0
Comments
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http://pbasewiki.srijith.net/tools
For downloading your photos from pbase. I just don't know what all information that will pull. If it will pull all the image text then that could be uploaded to SmugMug. And then uploading them that text should be pulled as a caption for the images.
For selling photos, with a power level account you can set something up to sell your photos, you just wouldn't be able to use our cart for that. Or if you want to go with the pro level account and use our cart to sell. We do have a tutorial on how to set up google checkout or paypal to your site here:
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/84515
And for upgrading your account. Nothing will change for your site, you will just have more tools to work with at the pro level then you will with the power level.
Support Hero and Customeister
http://www.smugmug.com/help
I guess this is a problem then for me - just too much effort to migrate a 700-900 image gallery manually.
I was hoping you had a screen scraping tool that could import - I could modify PBGrab (The tool you referred to) to do that and download them. If I have a local archive of the images and titles, can you auto upload them? Uploading manually is a pain. What I'd like however is that the dates of the blog entries to be retained - so it will need some backend jugglery by you.
http://www.uploadjunction.com/
?
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Its organized this way:
directory images/ has all the images numbered 0 to 1500.jpg
directory captions/ has all the captions for the images, numbered 0 to 1500.txt
directory titles/ has all the titles for the images, numbered 0 to 1500.txt
directory dates/ has all the image capture dates, numbered 0 to 1500.txt
All nice and neat. Notes - in some cases, you will see a captions text file but no image in the images folder for that number. That is because those blog entries have a youtube video - the captions text file for that number has the HTML code for youtube instead of text.
The dates directory exists because not all images may have EXIF
What you would need to do is like this:
for each (number)
upload images\number.jpg as image (if it exists)
set titles\number.txt as its title
set captions\number.txt as its caption (in the case of youtube its the iframe code
set dates\number.txt as its date (if its not empty)
I can read up smugmug APIs and try to do it myself, but since I have never seen it so far, it will be a much larger effort :-)
what say ?
The other way you could do it is to download each image and then write it into the exif and then just upload like normal. But I'm thinking there may be some limitations in doing this for the data you want to retain.
Want faster uploading? Vote for FTP!
Upload, what, exactly?
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My email above states exactly what. Please see post #8
I have the blog downloaded in the format described. If smugmug can now help upload it, I need to know if the format I have downloaded will work and how to send it to them to upload (ftp/etc)
HTML can be inserted in only these places, header, footer, biobox, photo caption or album description.
You're best bet is use an album description.
My Website index | My Blog
As a next step, I'm checking if smugmug folks can now take my local files and create a gallery for me according to post #8 (since they know their gallery structure and APIs better than me at this stage, and may have tools already at their disposal for bulk updates).
The only drawback to downloading everything local is the process of having to upload all that all over again (been there done that). Using the uploadfromurl method in the API would save a lot of this time.
Want faster uploading? Vote for FTP!
Hi Arjun, uploading a thousand files shouldn't be a big deal, I routinely am uploading thousands at a time for big shoots. What is your internet connection?
Edit: also, the very best way is to put your captions into the IPTC description field in the photo metadata - we'll read that as the caption and when you upload, the captions will automatically display. Holler if I'm missing something, OK?
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Hi Arjun: I am looking to migrate my photos from pbase to smugmug and found your old PBGrab. If the new one works better, I would love to try it. I will send you an email as well.
Thanks,
Tom
thanks
arjun
I now have two programs to completely automate:
a) pbgrab that sucks down images, captions, titles from pbase and makes a local archive with a neat browsable thumbnail gallery
b) pb2smug that reads a downloaded pbgrab gallery and uploads it to your smugmug gallery of choice
I'll soon release them for others to use.
Thanks Smugmug for the easy to use APIs and Paul Arthur for the lovely Perl wrapper. It took me less than 3 continuous hours to figure out the smugmug side of things and I'm a huge novice programmer!
One suggestion would be to make a direct migrator that goes straight from the pbase to SM. If someone had a large collection on pbase and wanted to just get it to SM, it's a lot of additional time to download and upload for just this process.
Want faster uploading? Vote for FTP!
Want faster uploading? Vote for FTP!
> All done! All 1000+ blog entries, photos and youtub videos have been nicely migrated to smugmug from pbase. I realized by using HTML captions (h1 for titles, h3 for date, normal for text) you can achieve a reasonably blog like effect.
>
> I now have two programs to completely automate:
> a) pbgrab that sucks down images, captions, titles from pbase and makes a local archive with a neat browsable thumbnail gallery
> b) pb2smug that reads a downloaded pbgrab gallery and uploads it to your smugmug gallery of choice
>
> I'll soon release them for others to use.
>
> Thanks Smugmug for the easy to use APIs and Paul Arthur for the lovely Perl wrapper. It took me less than 3 continuous hours to figure out the smugmug side of things and I'm a huge novice programmer!
Arjun,
I'm soon going to be moving from PBase to SmugMug. Is your PBGrab tool still available?I
RobR