He's making a point that the right way for Smugmug to attack this problem is to go analyze and instrument the code and have a developer find this problem, not have us bang on it from the outside looking for an elusive and perhaps non-existent easily reproducible case...... The question here is whether Smugmug really wants to fix this or not. If they do, then it's time to stop waiting for customers or testers of any kind to supply more info.
Yeah, I thought that was the case, just being silly. It was morning though, so in my dim-witted-ness, I thought I'd better be sure. I completely agree... I do not see this problem being solve-able with the amount of detail we're able to give on the user end. I mean, I feel like I'm giving all kinds of detail, yet I know it's not nearly what's really needed. We simply can't see the nuts & bolts behind the scenes. I do NOT understand though why Andy was able to show Samir that chart way-back-when, which was at least a little bit instructive, but the chart hasn't been seen since.
Possibly. And said developer goes from making a new feature that hundreds of thousands can benefit from to chasing something pretty elusive here. I'm really sorry that this rotate thing bites Anna Lisa and Samir (and I'm sure some few others) but we don't hear from anyone but Anna Lisa and Samir on this
I still want to reproduce it so that I don't make sorcerers spin their wheels.
Possibly. And said developer goes from making a new feature that hundreds of thousands can benefit from to chasing something pretty elusive here. I'm really sorry that this rotate thing bites Anna Lisa and Samir (and I'm sure some few others) but we don't hear from anyone but Anna Lisa and Samir on this
I still want to reproduce it so that I don't make sorcerers spin their wheels.
OK, now we at least know where you stand. You don't think this is an important enough bug to spend developer's time tracking it down given what we currently know. At least you're being clear about that now.
OK, now we at least know where you stand. You don't think this is an important enough bug to spend developer's time tracking it down given what we currently know. At least you're being clear about that now.
Oh I think it's important. But we have to give the Sorcerers something to work with It's that simple. Or else we sacrifice stuff that so many are expecting. I continue to work on this with Doc.
Oh I think it's important. But we have to give the Sorcerers something to work with It's that simple. Or else we sacrifice stuff that so many are expecting. I continue to work on this with Doc.
Translation - you don't think this bug is more important than any of the new features you're working on so no developer is assigned to work on it any time soon.
It is your business and you get to decide these things. I just want it to be completely clear to those who this is afflicting and to those who have spent a lot of time writing up their descriptions of how it happened to them what state this issue is in. Thank goodness I don't do rotations on Smugmug.
Translation - you don't think this bug is more important than any of the new features you're working on so no developer is assigned to work on it any time soon.
Stop it I think it's important. I and Doc have to be able to reliably reproduce it (despite what you and Samir say) before we can assign it for fixing to a Sorcerer. 'nuff said. Thanks.
Stop it I think it's important. I and Doc have to be able to reliably reproduce it (despite what you and Samir say) before we can assign it for fixing to a Sorcerer. 'nuff said. Thanks.
Ok, Andy-- may I just please have confirmation that you've shared my post #148 (from last night) with all the correct people, and hear that you all understand what happened this time? (rotations went farther after gallery settings were completed, even after they'd already appeared to be correctly rotated earlier) It will really help us users out, going forward, if we can just at the very very least, know that those who need to hear about issues are hearing about them. I also did not hear back whether you're able to produce a similar chart for me as you did for Samir in Post #30. At this point, I really don't know/care so much how this gets worked on, but I'd like to see something that shows me it is, & hasn't fallen by the wayside. I'd also like to rotate those photos to the correct orientation at some point since it's a public gallery. But I don't want to do that until all the correct people have seen the situation. So if you could let me know when everyone has seen the gallery who should?? That would help. Thank you.
He's making a point that the right way for Smugmug to attack this problem is to go analyze and instrument the code and have a developer find this problem, not have us bang on it from the outside looking for an elusive and perhaps non-existent easily reproducible case.
I actually wasn't trying to make a point about anything, lol. I was just trying to tell Lisa what we need to do if we want to see this fixed.
Bugs like this are hard to squash, and they aren't necessarily the most important based on the feedback here. It's something you have to live with unless you're going to go to extraordinary lengths to fix it. It's like...well, changing governement policy. It can be done, but who's going to care enough to do it? I may write a script to do all the rotations and stuff on 1000 galleries via the API, but even that will take more time than I spend in a year yelling at the monitor. It's a lose-lose scenario. Someday we'll have time to get this fixed as I know that it will just take thousands of tests to find the patterns. And between Lisa and I, we'll find a way...in the next decade or so.
Andy, I never did understand this question to Samir, either. It seems you would know why one would do this. You want a replicable situation. So in order to get one, isn't this precisely one way to get something replicable? He's just asking you to have the rotation task done a bunch of different times on the same batch he'd uploaded earlier, and make record of what happens. Why so hard to understand?
Let it go. Work on the tests and we'll use this thread to communicate our findings to each other.
I just don't have time to spend on repeated tests, and from now til July, it's only going to get worse. Yes, I've nearly given up. I can't even get an answer about the chart I've asked a buncha times. But I'll post any problems that I'm able to at least post the basics about. I just can't get into making test galleries & trying to replicate on my own & all that. Can only report what happens in the normal course of trying to do my usual stuff here. Have you ever had the situation I described in #148, though, where all looked good & then after doing other gallery settings tasks, photos rotated & ended up incorrectly oriented?
I just don't have time to spend on repeated tests, and from now til July, it's only going to get worse. Yes, I've nearly given up. I can't even get an answer about the chart I've asked a buncha times. But I'll post any problems that I'm able to at least post the basics about. I just can't get into making test galleries & trying to replicate on my own & all that. Can only report what happens in the normal course of trying to do my usual stuff here. Have you ever had the situation I described in #148, though, where all looked good & then after doing other gallery settings tasks, photos rotated & ended up incorrectly oriented?
I understand the feeling. The last thing I have time for is diagnosing this as I haven't even had time to upload about 10gb of stuff. The tests would prove useful to us too if we can figure out what triggers it because we can simply avoid whatever that is.
I have run into the situation you describe in post 148. In fact, I've seen it after a delay of days or even weeks. A gallery that will be fine for days suddenly will have one or two over-rotations.
And now that you mention that, you know there's a pattern right there--some photos never rotate, some over rotate. So somehow the rotation and which photo needs to be rotated is getting mixed up. So some photos get rotated twice while others never get rotated at all. If this was confined to a single gallery, we'd always have the same number of over-rotated and non-rotated images. But it's not. So maybe when some of our images don't rotate, someone elses are over-rotating, and vice-versa. It makes sense since the whole rotate queue is a singular queue. I wonder how that queue is maintained. I wonder if it's in that system or part of that code. Just ideas I guess since I can't look underneath the hood.
Guys, I am working on getting the error data on the rotation fails to see if we can figure out what is causing it. Rotations work for me. But I can see that they do sometimes fail for users. I will let you know when I find out more.
I understand the feeling. The last thing I have time for is diagnosing this as I haven't even had time to upload about 10gb of stuff. The tests would prove useful to us too........... Just ideas I guess since I can't look underneath the hood.
I have hardly ever had the problem of photos not rotating. In my case they almost always go one 90 degree turn too far. This is why I was trying to be absolutely sure that, when they land in a gallery, they are definitely not going to rotate any further on their own until we tell them to. Because... as you can see, it appears to me that some photos were maybe going to rotate on their own eventually. But then I told them to rotate, so what happens is they go one turn too far. But Andy assures me that once they land, they won't rotate anymore on their own. I've taken that at face value, but I cannot say I've actually tested it.
I"ll tell you one thing I AM sure about. Watermarking needs to have an option to happen when we first set up galleries, or something should be completely re-done with how watermarking is implemented, as that affects a lot of other tools too.
I"ll tell you one thing I AM sure about. Watermarking needs to have an option to happen when we first set up galleries, or something should be completely re-done with how watermarking is implemented, as that affects a lot of other tools too.
Let's keep this thread about rotating, OK?
You CAN have watermarking set to exactly how you want when you create galleries, using a quick setting. Please start a new thread on this if you need assistance thank you
You CAN have watermarking set to exactly how you want when you create galleries, using a quick setting. Please start a new thread on this if you need assistance thank you
If doing gallery settings is then causing a rotational shift, and watermarking is the only thing in gallery settings that would cause thumbs to regenerate, then one hypothesis is that they're connected. We've seen throughout this thread that there's a very possible cause & effect thing. As you know, watermarking and cropping thumbs also get intertwined. So we can keep this solely about rotation, but let's not rule out other gallery tools that affect eachother unless we're 100% sure we can rule them out completely. If all my corrected rotations later appeared fine until I did other settings, you'll have to forgive me for thinking they're connected, since you already told me we're 100% sure that photos landing in a gallery incorrectly rotated will stay that way until told to rotate. Somehow... we can't really have it both ways!
Ok, at the risk of making everyone pull their hair out again, I would like (well, not really, but "feel obligated" is more like it...) to present to you the most recent round of rotate issues. This one may shine a light on at least one of the problems. Here's a link to one of two photos in the same gallery that have rotated left one rotation too far: http://www.winsomeworks.com/Travel/Pennsylvania/Carnegie-Mellon-Pittsburgh-PA/15764073_oJwDk#1182073244_gGsRF The other one is at the bottom of that same page. Oddly, these photos, along with all of the other 27 photos that needed rotation, had been rotated correctly, per my command. (All 27 were portrait-oriented photos that originally came into the gallery on their sides, and I'd clicked "left" to get them in the correct orientation) Awhile later, I came back to the gallery and all photos were now in the correct orientation. Good!!
So I then went in & did my "gallery settings", including setting the watermarking, setting to XL3-size, etc. etc. I noticed after I did that that new thumbs were being generated or something-- I assumed because of the added watermarking, even though I don't watermark thumbs. I only noticed/knew this because some images suddenly had black borders on their long sides-- i.e. they were temporarily filled in with black at the sides to effectively make the thumbs square. If I'd refresh the page, different ones had black. Later on, all was fine; my gallery settings appeared correct, photos watermarked, black was gone, etc. except these two photos were on their sides, i.e.-- since the gallery settings, they'd rotated one turn too far. So now what they need is to be rotated right! I'm only leaving them this way for now your perusal.
The reason I say "this one may shine light...." is because I'm quite certain this has happened to me multiple times in the past. I know I've left galleries, thinking all was well, then done my gallery settings & left again. Then I'd come back much later or even days later & found over-rotated photos. So I really had a hunch that at least sometimes, a thumbnail re-generation or something like that was affecting prior rotations. I don't know if Samir has seen this...I don't know when he tends to do his settings. I also think I may have had this happen after bulk-captioning photos, but I won't swear to that, & am much more sure of this other thing-- gallery settings later changing some orientations.
Here are the steps I recall doing from the upload on, so that you can make some sense of this:
1. Uploaded 90 photos to gallery "Carnegie-Mellon..."
2. Arranged photos through the "Many Photos>Arrange>Arrange Photos" method.... first by date uploaded, then did some single moves.
3. Went back to gallery and manually arranged some photos on each page.
4. Clicked "Tools>Rotate" to rotate incorrectly-oriented photos.
5. All 27 photos that were incorrect just needed one (90 degree) left rotation, so I selected them & clicked rotate.
6. Left the gallery... went off & did something else.
7. Came back, maybe after 20 min. All photos in correct orientation.
8. Manually arranged a few more.
9. Did some color effects, some through Smug, some through PicNik.
10 (for clarification... neither photo that is now incorrect has had any color process done to it)
11. Went into gallery settings & did all the usual: set RCP, made public, added watermarking, set available size, wrote description, added gallery keywords, set print settings, etc.
12. Did bulk auto-color on a few dark photos at end of gallery.
13. Cropped a photo or two.
14. Noticed the thing going on that I mentioned up above: black borders, thumbs regenerating, etc. Decided to leave gallery alone for a bit.
15. Came back, saw two photos had rotated one step further for some reason, and were now horizontal when they should be vertical. Still this way after another hour or more.
It looks like our system rotated this photo 270 degrees at 9:02pm, then at 9:11pm added a watermark. Did you do any other processing on this image (picnik, cropping, etc) that you recall?
It looks like our system rotated this photo 270 degrees at 9:02pm, then at 9:11pm added a watermark. Did you do any other processing on this image (picnik, cropping, etc) that you recall?
Thanks for your help!
- Greg
Thanks for checking in. NO, I didn't do anything else to this photo. If you'll look at my numbered list, #10 tells you that neither photo that is currently messed up had any color processes done to it. A couple of others did, but none of the messed up ones. I was making sure this time to keep track of what I did. I only did gallery settings, incl. adding the bottom watermark to all of them.
Thanks for checking in. NO, I didn't do anything else to this photo. If you'll look at my numbered list, #10 tells you that neither photo that is currently messed up had any color processes done to it. A couple of others did, but none of the messed up ones. I was making sure this time to keep track of what I did. I only did gallery settings, incl. adding the bottom watermark to all of them.
What uploader are you using for this and does it happen every time you upload it or does it randomly fail?
Also, I am only interested right now in looking at this one photo. I wanted to make absolutely certain that the only two things you did to it were rotate it 90 degrees to the left and apply a watermark.
- Greg
P.S. I realize that some of this is repetitive - and I apologize for that. But, I am new to this issue and as much as I enjoy reading these forums, it would be very inefficient for me to go back through and try and read everything on this. You have my assurance though that if you can continue to answer my questions as we go along and provide the photos that Doc is asking for, I will continue working on this until I figure out where this bug is.
What uploader are you using for this and does it happen every time you upload it or does it randomly fail?
Also, I am only interested right now in looking at this one photo. I wanted to make absolutely certain that the only two things you did to it were rotate it 90 degrees to the left and apply a watermark.
- Greg
P.S. I realize that some of this is repetitive - and I apologize for that. But, I am new to this issue and as much as I enjoy reading these forums, it would be very inefficient for me to go back through and try and read everything on this. You have my assurance though that if you can continue to answer my questions as we go along and provide the photos that Doc is asking for, I will continue working on this until I figure out where this bug is.
Greg-- Ok, yeah, sorry I haven't been able to get the photo to Doc yet. It'll be a little while-- have other emails to answer, etc. Hopefully later tonight. As far as uploaders, I've typically used the Simple Uploader or HTML5. I always use FF as my browser. I haven't seen a difference in this issue based upon which uploader. In other words, the other day I'm pretty sure I used HTML5, but this issue has happened for a long long time for me, going way back before we even had HTML5. I would say that with perhaps every other upload or more, I'll have photos that rotate farther than they should... i.e. maybe not every upload but on half of them? I don't know... I've so often been in a rush uploading and didn't keep good track of it. And sometimes I go for long periods w/o uploading... I'll spend that time fixing up existing galleries, etc. I'm quite sure though that my own typical issue is an over-rotation. So it's not as if random photos are selecting themselves for rotation. It's that a few of the ones I choose to rotate (i.e. fix) end up going too far. It's never been lots & lots of photos at a time... typically just a handful of wayward ones in a batch.
To clarify about the water-marking... I didn't just choose that one photo for water-marking; I went in gallery settings to wm all of them, and it's possible that there are other things that we're able to do in Tools > Gallery Settings that could affect them. I did other settings in there as mentioned. I very rarely use square thumbs though; almost all my galleries such as this one use original thumbs. So it was after gallery settings, when I assume the water-marking was happening, that I saw the thumbs all looking weird in the gallery, and then went away & later found the messed up rotations that had been correct earlier. It is odd, because the 270-degree rotation to the right that you saw should have made it exactly correct... since 270 degrees to the right is the same as 90 degrees to the left.
About the thread-- yes, it's much too long to wade through. It's just that you'd quoted my post that had the info in it that you needed! But, s'ok... the detail here is ridiculous, and yet that's what's evidently needed. Ok, will get the photo to Doc in awhile.
Doc, I haven't figured out how I actually send something to the help desk. I used the link in your sig... but the form that comes up doesn't appear to include a way to send something other than a message that I'd write. I know I sent something to Andy only a couple wks ago, but can't recall how or where I did that. Sorry! I'll check back in awhile.
About the thread-- yes, it's much too long to wade through. It's just that you'd quoted my post that had the info in it that you needed! But, s'ok... the detail here is ridiculous, and yet that's what's evidently needed. Ok, will get the photo to Doc in awhile.
Thank you for the clarification - I will get the photos from Doc tomorrow. In the meantime, I have 3 working theories on what might be happening here. They all require great leaps of faith in the imagination department, but one of them was a fix for something I discovered a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure exactly when that fix went live, it was possible that it was after you uploaded your photos on Feb 8th - but it is live now for sure. Do you anticipate doing another round of uploads in the next few days (I do not want to create unnecessary work for you).
Now that I have added logging to some areas, I need another example of this happening, so please let me know if you have one pop up - and please do not fix the image until I've had time look at it.
But, I am new to this issue and as much as I enjoy reading these forums, it would be very inefficient for me to go back through and try and read everything on this.
What happened to all the data Sean and I gathered on this issue?
Thank you for the clarification - I will get the photos from Doc tomorrow. In the meantime, I have 3 working theories on what might be happening here. They all require great leaps of faith in the imagination department, but one of them was a fix for something I discovered a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure exactly when that fix went live, it was possible that it was after you uploaded your photos on Feb 8th - but it is live now for sure. Do you anticipate doing another round of uploads in the next few days (I do not want to create unnecessary work for you).
Now that I have added logging to some areas, I need another example of this happening, so please let me know if you have one pop up - and please do not fix the image until I've had time look at it.
- Greg
Yep, I can upload some batches... I'm always behind-- possibly Fri.; if not, Sat.
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I still want to reproduce it so that I don't make sorcerers spin their wheels.
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It is your business and you get to decide these things. I just want it to be completely clear to those who this is afflicting and to those who have spent a lot of time writing up their descriptions of how it happened to them what state this issue is in. Thank goodness I don't do rotations on Smugmug.
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Stop it
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Of course I have.
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Bugs like this are hard to squash, and they aren't necessarily the most important based on the feedback here. It's something you have to live with unless you're going to go to extraordinary lengths to fix it. It's like...well, changing governement policy. It can be done, but who's going to care enough to do it? I may write a script to do all the rotations and stuff on 1000 galleries via the API, but even that will take more time than I spend in a year yelling at the monitor. It's a lose-lose scenario. Someday we'll have time to get this fixed as I know that it will just take thousands of tests to find the patterns. And between Lisa and I, we'll find a way...in the next decade or so.
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I have run into the situation you describe in post 148. In fact, I've seen it after a delay of days or even weeks. A gallery that will be fine for days suddenly will have one or two over-rotations.
And now that you mention that, you know there's a pattern right there--some photos never rotate, some over rotate. So somehow the rotation and which photo needs to be rotated is getting mixed up. So some photos get rotated twice while others never get rotated at all. If this was confined to a single gallery, we'd always have the same number of over-rotated and non-rotated images. But it's not. So maybe when some of our images don't rotate, someone elses are over-rotating, and vice-versa. It makes sense since the whole rotate queue is a singular queue. I wonder how that queue is maintained. I wonder if it's in that system or part of that code. Just ideas I guess since I can't look underneath the hood.
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http://help.smugmug.com
I"ll tell you one thing I AM sure about. Watermarking needs to have an option to happen when we first set up galleries, or something should be completely re-done with how watermarking is implemented, as that affects a lot of other tools too.
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
Let's keep this thread about rotating, OK?
You CAN have watermarking set to exactly how you want when you create galleries, using a quick setting. Please start a new thread on this if you need assistance thank you
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Hello WinsomeWorks,
Thank you for leaving the photos "messed up" so I could look at them. I want to focus specifically on this photo: http://www.winsomeworks.com/Travel/Pennsylvania/Carnegie-Mellon-Pittsburgh-PA/15764073_oJwDk#1182073244_gGsRF
It looks like our system rotated this photo 270 degrees at 9:02pm, then at 9:11pm added a watermark. Did you do any other processing on this image (picnik, cropping, etc) that you recall?
Thanks for your help!
- Greg
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What uploader are you using for this and does it happen every time you upload it or does it randomly fail?
Also, I am only interested right now in looking at this one photo. I wanted to make absolutely certain that the only two things you did to it were rotate it 90 degrees to the left and apply a watermark.
- Greg
P.S. I realize that some of this is repetitive - and I apologize for that. But, I am new to this issue and as much as I enjoy reading these forums, it would be very inefficient for me to go back through and try and read everything on this. You have my assurance though that if you can continue to answer my questions as we go along and provide the photos that Doc is asking for, I will continue working on this until I figure out where this bug is.
To clarify about the water-marking... I didn't just choose that one photo for water-marking; I went in gallery settings to wm all of them, and it's possible that there are other things that we're able to do in Tools > Gallery Settings that could affect them. I did other settings in there as mentioned. I very rarely use square thumbs though; almost all my galleries such as this one use original thumbs. So it was after gallery settings, when I assume the water-marking was happening, that I saw the thumbs all looking weird in the gallery, and then went away & later found the messed up rotations that had been correct earlier. It is odd, because the 270-degree rotation to the right that you saw should have made it exactly correct... since 270 degrees to the right is the same as 90 degrees to the left.
About the thread-- yes, it's much too long to wade through. It's just that you'd quoted my post that had the info in it that you needed! But, s'ok... the detail here is ridiculous, and yet that's what's evidently needed. Ok, will get the photo to Doc in awhile.
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
http://help.smugmug.com
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
Thank you for the clarification - I will get the photos from Doc tomorrow. In the meantime, I have 3 working theories on what might be happening here. They all require great leaps of faith in the imagination department, but one of them was a fix for something I discovered a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure exactly when that fix went live, it was possible that it was after you uploaded your photos on Feb 8th - but it is live now for sure. Do you anticipate doing another round of uploads in the next few days (I do not want to create unnecessary work for you).
Now that I have added logging to some areas, I need another example of this happening, so please let me know if you have one pop up - and please do not fix the image until I've had time look at it.
- Greg
Want faster uploading? Vote for FTP!
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com