Fixing Phanfare Subsite Migration Messes

MikeLaurel

I originally posted this on another thread, but I want to start a new discussion about how I'm getting around this particular migration problem:

A real pain I'm dealing with is how subsites were migrated from Phanfare to SmugMug. In some cases, I may have published Phanfare albums to maybe 4 or 5 subsites on Phanfare. Through the conversion process, I now have many cases of duplicate galleries. Yes, I only have one original, but, unfortunately, I'm finding in several cases that the originals are spread across the 4 or 5 galleries in SmugMug. Maybe one gallery has 20 of the originals, another has 8, and so on. I really would like the originals to be in one gallery, not spread all over the place. In some cases, the conversion did put all the originals in the same gallery, but in others it did not. I've also found situations where I have different image counts between the supposed identical galleries, which is really puzzling.

Here's a way to get down to one gallery with all the originals:

• Your Phanfare -> SmugMug migration will contain some top-level folders of each subsite's contents. You should be able to look in each subsite and see which Phanfare albums (a.k.a galleries) were in each.
• For a particular gallery that's duplicated across subsites, pick a gallery that has mixed collected/original photos in it that you want to become your "master gallery" with all the originals. For this example, let's call my gallery "Birthday". It has 30 photos, 20 of which are originals and 10 of which are collected.
• Now, go a "subsite" folder and find the same gallery ("Birthday") that you identified in the previous step. Let's suppose this gallery has 5 original and 25 collected photos.
• Select all of the photos (Ctrl+A/Cmd+A) in gallery. Drag them to the master "Birthday" gallery.
• A menu appears. Choose Move (not Collect).
• All the pictures are moved to the Master "Birthday" gallery.
• Delete the empty gallery.
• Go to the Master "Birthday" gallery and look at your photos. You should now see 30 photos, but notice that 25 are now original and 5 are collected. (When you move a collected photo into a gallery with its master, the collected photo disappears.)
• Continue the process finding other "Birthday" galleries on other "subsite" folders, moving all the photos to the Master "Birthday" gallery.

You should now have a master Birthday gallery with all the photos in it.
The example I gave assumes that all Birthday galleries have the same number of photos. I find that's usually the case, but I have seen some subsite migrations where not all the photos made it, so the numbers may not match. Even in that case, the above process will help you get all the pictures back into one master gallery of originals.

No, it's not fun, but it's the best way I've figured to undo a subsite migration mess, since SmugMug wasn't interested in implementing any kind of fix for this migration problem.