The new gallery cover image adjustment feature doesn't save the position

Jtring

I observe SM went live this evening with the promised feature to re-position gallery cover images. The basic implementation is quite slick: just drag the image up and down to position it. That works wonderfully and when I hit save, there it is in its new, perfect, alignment.

Unfortunately, when I navigate away from the gallery and return, the re-positioning is gone. The image is back to being at its original centered position. That's a bug. Please find a way make that new position parameter stick.

Quick update: All I need to do is refresh the page to lose the new position and return to the default center position.

David_S85

I couldn't find the tool that repositions the cover image. Is it still done from Appearance > Cover Image?

Jtring

@David_S85 said:
I couldn't find the tool that repositions the cover image. Is it still done from Appearance > Cover Image

There's a little four-pointed arrow at the top right of the cover image on a gallery page once the cover is enabled. Click it and you can move the image around. Stay tuned about the bug, though. I can move the image and have it stick on most pages. I'm really only having an issue on one page, which suggest some local corruption. I'll have a full write up in a minute.

David_S85

@Jtring Oh, thanks! I see it now. Will play around with a few of those and see if they stay saved.

Jtring

As I noted in my response to David_S85, I only seem to be having the problem in one gallery, and there only with one image: the image of a poppy I had up as the cover before all this started. (I had some custom CSS in place to re-position that image. Not surprisingly, the new capability blew it away.)

I've never been successful with re-positioning that image, even with clearing my cache and cookies, but if I put a different image up as the cover, I can re-position it. If you go to the gallery now, you'll see a different image with a picnic table and a reservoir, all nicely aligned. Go back to the poppy and the problems return. Likewise, I've gone to a few other galleries where I have with cover images up, have moved the images around, and have successfully saved the new positions. The only oddity is that it sometimes takes a long time (5 or 10 seconds) for the page finish re-loading loading after I click "Save".

So it looks like something in the database of new positions is messed up for just that one image. Not sure how that happened. Being able to corrupt the database is a bug, but not quite the one I though I was a seeing at first.

Jtring

I've now got a second gallery where the adjustment doesn't want to stick. And about ten where it does.

And a third un-sticky one. Nothing worse than an intermittent problem ...

David_S85

I've already had the error messages that the image position does not want to save. Rough start.

Jtring

@Jtring said:
I've now got a second gallery where the adjustment doesn't want to stick. And about ten where it does.

And a third un-sticky one. Nothing worse than an intermittent problem ...

A clue: all three of the fails were with original images that were cropped to be square rather than in portrait or landscape orientation.

Jtring

More experiments with the first of my problem galleries. Maybe some of this can guide the debugging.

First, I tried deleting and re-uploading the square poppy image I couldn't re-position yesterday. Old results. It came up centered as the cover image and no position changes survived a page refresh. The picnic table picture still worked as a cover and was still re-positionable, so I went back to it.

Second, I uploaded an additional version of the poppy picture, cropped to be just a little bit off-square (2016 x 2033), and tried that as a cover picture. It located itself differently than the first poppy picture. It was centered well above the center of the image, actually very close to where I wanted it with a spotted cucumber beetle on one of the petals showing nicely. (To debug code, one really should be working with a picture of a bug.) But I still couldn't adjust this one up or down for fine tuning and have it survive a page refresh.

Third, I uploaded yet another version, 5:4 landscape orientation crop of the poppy, and set it as the cover picture. I came up positioned at the center but now I could slide it up and have the results stick. That's up there now. All three versions of the picture are in the gallery.

So there is something odd with square or near-square pictures, and something odd about how the algorithm selects the default position. On the second attempt, and only the second attempt, did the algorithm identify the spotted cucumber beetle as the point of interest?

Jtring

More follow ups.

I adjusted the crop on the second copy, making it just a little off-square in the landscape direction (2033 x 2016) instead of the portrait direction that I had before. It came up centered as a cover image and could be permanently re-positioned. Go figure.

And just to check, I tried a 3:4 portrait image as the cover. It worked fine.

(I'm back to the 4:3 landscape poppy/bug picture for the cover image. Looks best to my eye.)

leftquark

If you could send me links to the Galleries which aren't saving (or links to the photos which are having issues), I can take a peak and see what we can find.

Jtring

The galleries are linked in the messages above, but here they are again

https://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/Bay-Area-Day-Hiking/Bay-Area-Day-Hiking-2016/EBMUD-Trails-from-Inspiration-Po/

https://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/Bay-Area-Day-Hiking/Bay-Area-2014/Mt-Diablo-Juniper-to-Summit/

https://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/Bay-Area-Day-Hiking/Bay-Area-Day-Hiking-2015/Mt-Diablo-Fire-Zone-April-2015/

The first one has the 1:1 (square) image and some others as noted in the post three steps up. I've played with additional galleries and the issue seems quite repeatable: a choice of a square (1:1 aspect ratio) source for the cover image gives me one I can't move. Other aspect ratios I use regularly -- I've tried 3:4, 4:3, 3:5 -- give cover images that work just fine.

Added note: I moved the cover image in the first gallery above back to the square original so the repositioning fails. Read the posts above for what happens with the other similar pictures at the end of the gallery when I use them for the cover. Note that it looks like repositioning works, but if you refresh the page, the cover image goes back to the original position.

leftquark

The issue with the breadcrumb has been fixed. We'll take a look at the issue with saving next

Jtring

Looks like the issue with saving has been fixed. I don't know if that happened today or ten days ago, but I circled back today and found things work. Thank you.

leftquark

Yep - great to hear!