Migrating a PBase blog to smugmug

arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
edited July 15, 2012 in SmugMug Support
Update Jul 10 2012: This issue is now solved - the pbase galleries have been migrated to Smugmug. See post #21.

- - - - 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

Comments

  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited July 2, 2012
    Arjun! Stay tuned, I'll have one of our helpers help.
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 3, 2012
    Thanks Andy. Look forward to it.
  • Smug EricSmug Eric Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 333
    edited July 4, 2012
    So I'm not all that familiar with pbase, and I'm not 100% on how we would go about getting your photos from them to us. I am not seeing any of our tools that will automate transferring photos from there. I did find a tool here:

    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.
    Eric
    Support Hero and Customeister
    http://www.smugmug.com/help
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 5, 2012
    Eric, thanks. That tool you are referring to was written by me several years ago. It won't work for what I need right now (pbase disabled some XML data a long time ago after which this tool stopped working).

    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.

    Smug Eric wrote: »
    So I'm not all that familiar with pbase, and I'm not 100% on how we would go about getting your photos from them to us. I am not seeing any of our tools that will automate transferring photos from there. I did find a tool here:

    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.
  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited July 5, 2012
    I haven't tried it but have you looked at
    http://www.uploadjunction.com/
    ?
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 5, 2012
    Yes, I did try. It only allows moving PBase to Zenfolio, flickr or Picasa. And that too, all galleries. Did not work for me.
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 5, 2012
    Okay, Eric, I just hacked together a modified pbgrab script that downloads all my images, captions and blog post date. I wrote it to work around PBase's current lack of support for the XML they once used to export.

    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 ?
  • SamirDSamirD Registered Users Posts: 3,474 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    What a task! I definitely don't envy you. But I think you're definitely on the right track, and the API is powerful enough to do it. You should be able to create a script that will actually use the upload from url method to just upload the file directly from your existing pbase. That should speed up the upload process. Then just enumerate through the various titles/captions/dates to set those on each image in the API.

    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.
    Pictures and Videos of the Huntsville Car Scene: www.huntsvillecarscene.com
    Want faster uploading? Vote for FTP!
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    Hi Samir, the reworked PBase downloader is working great. I took a look at the Smugmug APIs - they are pretty simple - I should be done in a few days to add a smugmug upload to the script too. Since I haven't heard back from the smugmug folks on whether they can upload it, I guess its upto me.
  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    arjunrc wrote: »
    Since I haven't heard back from the smugmug folks on whether they can upload it, I guess its upto me.

    Upload, what, exactly?
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    Andy wrote: »
    Upload, what, exactly?

    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)
  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,007 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    arjunrc wrote: »
    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)
    You have exactly two choices of adding things on Smugmug. Upload photos or insert html somewhere.
    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.
    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    Allen, I am not sure if your reply is directly applicable in my case. I have around 1500 photos each with captions and titles. Uploading them manually is very daunting, which is why I asked smugmug support if they had a tool to suck it out of PBase. Eric responded he didn't, so I wrote my own tool and now have all of them on my hard drive.
    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).
  • SamirDSamirD Registered Users Posts: 3,474 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    arjunrc wrote: »
    Hi Samir, the reworked PBase downloader is working great. I took a look at the Smugmug APIs - they are pretty simple - I should be done in a few days to add a smugmug upload to the script too. Since I haven't heard back from the smugmug folks on whether they can upload it, I guess its upto me.
    I think it is up to you as I've not seen SM do a mass upload for a client as of yet. ne_nau.gif

    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.
    Pictures and Videos of the Huntsville Car Scene: www.huntsvillecarscene.com
    Want faster uploading? Vote for FTP!
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    Actually, this tool I am writing would be of help to both PBasers who want to move to SM or just archive. Many just want to keep a local archive, so I wanted to make sure I do that first :-) Next step - read up on APIs and upload on SM. I need to understand the album structure at SM for this - I took a quick look at the dump from albums.get() seems like a complex nested structure :-)
  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    arjunrc wrote: »
    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)

    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? ear.gif

    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?
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    Hi Andy its not as simple as that, unfortunately (i.e internet bandwidth - thats not the issue). Let me explain it - I have 1000+ images. I also have a 1000+ captions. I also have 1000+ titles. I also have a 1000+ dates. All *pre-created*, because we are talking about migrating an existing gallery. Its not a simple matter of zipping a 1000 images and uploading. It needs to be uploaded in a way that titles, captions and dates associated to each file are matched and preserved. Hope this clears.
  • htbyronhtbyron Registered Users Posts: 2 Beginner grinner
    edited July 10, 2012
    arjunrc wrote: »
    Hi Samir, the reworked PBase downloader is working great. I took a look at the Smugmug APIs - they are pretty simple - I should be done in a few days to add a smugmug upload to the script too. Since I haven't heard back from the smugmug folks on whether they can upload it, I guess its upto me.

    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
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    Hi Tom, got your email. If it's ok, I'll send you the file in a few days. I'm almost done with the smugmug upload part - I want to clean it up a bit (though that won't be enabled for you yet when I send it - its got a lot of stuff specific to my needs)
    thanks
    arjun
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 10, 2012
    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!
  • SamirDSamirD Registered Users Posts: 3,474 Major grins
    edited July 13, 2012
    Very sweet! Great that you got this doing exactly what you wanted. thumb.gif

    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.
    Pictures and Videos of the Huntsville Car Scene: www.huntsvillecarscene.com
    Want faster uploading? Vote for FTP!
  • arjunrcarjunrc Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
    edited July 13, 2012
    Samir, true. I'll add that in v2. Simple enough to patch it in given that I have the basics in place. Thx
  • SamirDSamirD Registered Users Posts: 3,474 Major grins
    edited July 15, 2012
    arjunrc wrote: »
    Samir, true. I'll add that in v2. Simple enough to patch it in given that I have the basics in place. Thx
    thumb.gif I'm glad you've got something in place and have made it available for other pbase users. I remember looking at pbase a few years back--it's a great place, but wasn't something that met my needs.
    Pictures and Videos of the Huntsville Car Scene: www.huntsvillecarscene.com
    Want faster uploading? Vote for FTP!
  • RobRRobR Registered Users Posts: 48 Big grins
    > @arjunrc said:
    > 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
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