Missing Pictures

Oh: so you were just playing around.

But I knew that already!

iSpot creates the following images:
full size:

screen size: on the observation -

medium size: on the List View

Thumbnail : (gallery, carousels, thumbnail on observation)

Their urls are:
full size:https://api.ispotnature.org/storage/app/sites/default/files/images/6268/60750ce00504d5553d1da61065c24250_0.jpg
screen size:https://api.ispotnature.org/storage/app/sites/default/files/images/6268/1407746_cuts/large_60750ce00504d5553d1da61065c24250_0.jpg
medium size:https://api.ispotnature.org/storage/app/sites/default/files/images/6268/1407746_cuts/medium_60750ce00504d5553d1da61065c24250_0.jpg
Thumbnail:https://api.ispotnature.org/storage/app/sites/default/files/images/6268/1407746_cuts/small_60750ce00504d5553d1da61065c24250_0.jpg

I thought that you had discovered a way of getting ones picture loaded from iSpot.

There is a difference. I suppose, between Missing Picture and Picture not added - how do we tell?


And this

have you contacted Shobe to ask him to check?
And this https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/southern-africa/view/observation/406848/101-lady-moon - you show the Thumb and picture is not displaying in the post - suggesting differnce tween not added and not displaying

No I Wasn’t playing around & since you knew all that why did you ask me how I did it? & why accuse me of reloading the picture? Your comments had hinted twice that they might be missing so I pointed out they weren’t, so none would try to reload them again. What’s wrong with that?

All these had pictures loaded on iSpot, and which displayed for a while. As those who agreed to the identifications can testify (and I have the emails to that effect, just in case). I think the Egret picture was on for over an hour (or rather it was on for over an hour when I saw it and agreed to it). There is nothing to ask Shobe, other than if he accidentally deleted the picture.

The last one is showing the picture placeholder, which as you point out suggests that there is a different fault here. But still no picture.
Obviously sometimes iSpot detects that the picture is missing an inserts the url:
(https://www.ispotnature.org/static/images/website/missing/small.png)

thumb:

or

large:

and I presume that there is a medium too: let us try:

and sometimes it does not insert the placeholder which suggests that it might have found the picture, or the folder, and could not link it (or is it the other way around?)

Hang on now. It was you that got the wrong end of the stick and got confused. Not me.

My question was about missing pictures (see the topic) and how to find and fix them.
If you misinterpreted and tried to find pictures that were already there, then I am afraid you missed the whole point.

As I said I know how to find pictures that are there!!! I am trying to find out how to get the missing ones fixed.

As outlined above there are three possibilities:

  • the picture (of what ever size) exists but is stored incorrectly (wrong folder, wrong url - depending on the bug)
  • the picture is lost (was not copied across - in error, or was copied across incorrectly (= previous), or deleted by some process) during the transfer
  • the picture was lost during or shortly after uploading (i.e. after the transfer: i.e. a current bug).

We are trying to find out which of these (1 or many) applies. And how to rectify it. i.e. from backups or by tweaking the urls.

In this case we can see:

And so the issue is a programming one. iSpot has lost the pictures, either because the link in the database is wrong or because the pictures were copied incorrectly.
I would put my money on the latter: that there is a character in the url name that iSpot cannot cope with due to sloppy programming.

So the question is: how to get these fixed to the observations missing them?
(and reloading them from your backups at home is not an acceptable answer).

So I showed the full screen image was there, in these ‘missing picture’ cases even though it doesn’t appear in the post,& that after all is all that is shown in a post, so we can never know from a post whether the original with exif is there; hence the picture is there so no need to upload, which is the point I was making

iSpot always strips out the exif (since Sept 2014)*** from the picture and then compresses it. So the original with exif is never there. Only the compressed exifless version. Which may be there even if iSpot cannot find it from the observation.

***(I never checked, but was told on the ZA site (i.e. pre Sept 2014 when we were separate) that the southern African pictures only had their exif removed if the localities were hidden. After Sept 2014 the exif data was never there.)

Yes, & no longer in my earliest, 2012, & doubtless the rest

In some cases (e.g. the fish ones you highlighted).

Now is it true in all cases: is this just one bug, or several bugs.
Could it be if iSpot shows the placeholder the pictures exist but iSpot has messed up the url and so cannot show it or find; but if there is no placeholder then the pictures have vanished in a more serious fashion.

Not knowing how iSpot handles the picture names it is impossible for us to work out how to relink, and if we did we dont have the access to do it anyway.

Well for the 5 I looked at from ‘101 Lady moon’ down as I used the same way as on my ordinary file, it must be true. in my own latest https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/observation/735207/aromia-moschata22 , the thumbnail etc addresses are different,(include “frontend”) but the same extraction process still gives full screen url

reply: not just different quite different!!!
yours has /frontend/9999/ in addition to older data and also the others have hexadecimal type file names, whereas yours is the title.
I wonder if yours is temporary and the transfer from the recent to the long-term is where some of the data are going missing.
No: the change happened on 28 June. All pictures before have the format:
-h ttps://api.ispotnature.org/storage/app/sites/default/files/images/45124/1407748_cuts/medium_b11c560d90c82687875d6bd4ae6aa565.jpg-

and all afterwards have the format:
-https://api.ispotnature.org/storage/app/sites/default/files/frontend/39022/201707/1419989_cuts/medium_IMG_5805.JPG-

Why on earth make the site so complicated?
But I am willing to bet that some character in the file name -esp. after June 28 is what is causing some of the pictures to disappear because iSpot renders the file name incorrectly.

The older files must have a different cause: probably not copied across properly.

Lets hope it’s something that simple, then it can be easily fixed.

Here is another (quite valuable) record that has lost its picture


all 4 images from this observation appear as banned signs https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/southern-africa/view/observation/474399/pisaurid-to-the-left

Not banned: merely missing - an unfortunate symbol indeed!

It appears that some people have seen the image in this observation

but it’s refusing to display for me.

Be patient - it’s there (for me)

Why is this new site so slow? Why do we have to be so patient? I spend hours being patient for iSpot!!!

It is quite amazing: sometimes the page refreshes three or four times, each with a different structure, before the actual display page shows. I dont know if it is just the html slowly unpacking, or if there is lots of useless baggage sent down with the page.
What is interesting is that for one of my projects which changed its url (yes: depending on the filters it changes from ~/globa/~ to ~/southern-africa/~ ) is that the empty page loaded (a three step process) and was then wiped and replaced with the 404-page not found screen. Why does iSpot not check if the page is there BEFORE sending down the data?

On this entry

none of the photographs are displaying for me just the grey placeholder image.

(copied over from Pictures not displaying) by @DavidHowdon

By the by: Magda found that some characters are illegal in the picture titles (the ones alongside the pictures when you edit or upload), and that if she edited out these characters then her pictures displayed.

OK: Bug #457. The character “#” is illegal in the picture title and will hide the picture. Edit it out and the pictures will show.

I checked the titles of the images in the pisaurid ob above and there were none so I gave them a,b,c & d. Now the thumbnails are displayed but not the larger image. The zoom button brings up an image but the full size button says no image available