I have a gallery that is both on my local machine for development as well as on my remote server. The zenphoto software is the same on both and the only differences are the db specific info (username, pass, dbname) are different. I am using Zenphoto version 1.4.1.6 [8326].

Recently I have had a problem getting the image title to "stick" from one location to the other using the db backup-restore process. There are photos from three sources. My iphone, my wife's camera and the photographer's camera.

Any changes I make to my or my wife's photos seems to be fine. If I make a backup of the local db then pass that backup file to my remote machine and do a restore all changes are reflected. But, if I make changes to the photographer's photo title (in the admin interface) the changes to the title are not there on the other location.

I can see the changes by looking inside the .zdb file that is created so they are being saved correctly. The only difference in the image files (they are all jpg files) is that the Title and Description properties in the image file are filled in with "OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA" which is used as the default title instead of the file name when the photo is first added to the album.

Hopefully I am just missing something simple about why the title would not be able to be changed. I don't want to have to strip all that info from the files and reupload them (having to also re-add the descriptions that seem to be fine) that will be lost in this process.
The only thing I found that worked was to delete the file then add it back in after removing the title property from the file itself.

Thanks for any pointers in the right direction.

You need to understand that Zenphoto is file system based regarding the gallery and albums. So if an image file is new it will be discovered as new. If you want to match both you need to upload the same images/albums first, and then restore the database using the db backup tool on the admin overview page. Otherwise all files are discovered as new and the database is not matching.

That is exactly what I have been doing acrylian. I have the same exact photos in my albums folder in both places. That is why I have been scratching my head as to why I can't place a title that sticks from one location to the other.

I uploaded the album directory contents (with all albums and sub-albums) using ftp directly from one to the other.

I'm looking for the option you suggested about the meta data now to see if this helps. The strangest part is that the descriptions from the files with the title problems are fine. It is just the titles that are giving me trouble.

Thanks!

Ok, just wanted to be sure..:-)

Again, titles in metadata and added via backend are two different things. Zenphoto cannot add to the metadata, just to the database.

Also it is a known issue that some camera vendors do not follow the standards of metadata exactly so sometimes it is not read correctly therefore.

Just to be clear:

The files on the server will almost always have different "mtime" stamps than the ones on the local installation. If that mtime is "newer" than the database value the image is considered new and will have its metadata imported. The timestamp will almost always be newer given the scenerio you describe.

The next release--available in the nightly build--has a feature to make Zenphoto ignore selected metadata fields. So you could "disable" the title field and prevent the erroneous "OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA" title that the Olympus has so generoulsy provided for you.

You hit the nail on the head sbillard. I was playing around with changing the title field from the icon itself (windows 7) and sometimes this value would be automagically pulled into the database. sometimes...

Thank you for the clarification as to what was going on. I was pretty sure that if was the metadata being polled and being more important than the title I had given it. I'll migrate over to use the nightly builds since this is not for anything critical and can suffer any hiccups while the new version is becoming finalized.

Thanks for the information from both of you.