For the second time, all of my descriptions have been deleted! What is causing this? Does the "Refresh Metadata" link on the admin overview page delete descriptions?

I have nearly 1,000 photos in my gallery and I had just finished adding descriptions a couple of weeks ago.

There was recently a ticket opened for this problem: http://www.zenphoto.org/trac/ticket/1325

You may want to try installing the nightly build.

Checked out the ticket...

What's to keep this from happening again? I had all my descriptions deleted about a year ago, but at that time I didn't have very many.

I've spent many hours adding descriptions, complete with links, etc. I don't want to have to redo everything again the next time I upgrade.

Your best bet to keep this from happening is to place your descriptions in the image as metadata. Zenphoto will import such metadata and populate the database. Adobe Bridge is a good tool for this, but any application that can edit EXIF/IPTC fields will do. You can store the real Title, Description, and Tags with the image if you do this.

Also you can use the backup facility to backup your database. Had you done this it would have been a simple matter to restore the lost data.

Yeah, I skipped the backup on my last upgrade.

Let's say I add descriptions in the metadata using Adobe Bridge or something similar. When I replace all the photos on my server, will I have to recreate all of my custom crops? Or will they remain?

If the image name does not change the crops will still be there. But I recommend you back up the database since if you loose it, you loose the crops.

Another question regarding metadata:

Why does a Japanese character display instead of "sec" for shutterspeed in the exif info?

See http://www.bryanbrazil.com/gallery/Places/San%20Francisco%2C%20CA/Golden%20Gate%20Postcard.jpg.php

I checked the exif in another program and it properly displays the shutterspeed.

Probably because the software you use does not properly identify the character set it uses. See the last option on the image tab.

The IPTC encoding in Zenphoto options was set to "Western European (ISO)". I tried some of the other options, but keep getting Japanese characters after the shutterspeed. And it's not on all photos by a particular camera, only certain ones.

I added image descriptions in Bridge that contain urls. When they're imported into Zenphoto, all the html markup is stripped out. Does the Zenphoto import function do this? The html tags are allowed on Zenphoto's general options page.

Fixed the iptc encoding issue by doing a metadata refresh. Still wondering about html in descriptions, though.

A bit curious about this, as I've done the refresh metadata and not had such issues. And yes, I did so after upgrade to 1.2.7. The ticket linked doesn't really state if there was a bug or anything, but I assume there was as the ticket status was set to fixed. So I would guess there was actually something that needed fixing and going to nightly should handle it.

I can confirm the html tag deletion from meta data in 1.2.7 and I am wondering myself about it. I noticed this on our own site when adding entries to the showcase. This did not happen before. I will consult sbillard as I am not familiar with the meta data stuff.

Just to add, I never noticed that descriptions got lost by meta data update, I will at least try to reproduce that on my installations.

The same thing happened to me when reseting. I reset everything. So, I am not sure which field caused the issue.

Sounds like upgrading to a nightly will fix the problem.
If I upgrade to a nightly build, will the data be wiped again?
Will backing up the database before upgrading, then restoring the database, return the data and keep it from being wiped?

http://www.zenphoto.org/2009/12/workaround-to-prevent-accidentally-deleted-image-descriptions-in-1-2-7/

thanks.
I upgraded to the nightly. hopefully the problem will never happen again.

The descriptions didn't re-load. however, The descriptions seem to still be available in the admin section when they clear out.

When I clicked over to each images section for the individual albums, I was able to click save and republish the descriptions.