Thursday, September 19, 2013

Gallery Server Pro 3.0.3 Released

Today we released 3.0.3, containing a number of updated third party components and a few bug fixes. This release is a free upgrade to 3.0 license holders. Upgrading is easy – just copy the files from the upgrade package over your existing web application. Installations and upgrades for other scenarios are in the Quick Start Guide.

Updated components

Gallery Server Pro uses several third party components to provide an enhanced experience over what can be achieved with just the .NET Framework. These components were updated to the latest version:

  • Json.NET 5.0.6
  • Microsoft HTTP Client Libraries 2.2.13
  • Microsoft ASP.NET Web API Client Libraries 4.0.30506.0
  • Microsoft ASP.NET Web API Core Libraries 4.0.30506.0
  • Microsoft ASP.NET Web API Web Host 4.0.30506.0
  • Microsoft ASP.NET Web API 4.0.30506.0
  • Microsoft ASP.NET Universal Providers Core Libraries 1.2
  • MSBuildTasks 1.4.0.61
  • ErikEJ.SqlCeBulkCopy 2.1.6.3

Bug fixes

After releasing 3.0.2 about a week ago, we noticed a couple issues that we wanted to quickly fix. While we were at it, we threw in an easy bug fix.

Error "Cannot find skin path"

This bug was accidentally introduced in 3.0.2 and only affected those users. In galleries that were upgraded from 2.6, the following error can appear on the Site Settings - General page

Cannot find skin path
The gallery is configured to use a skin named Dark, but no skin by that name was found in the skin directory. Instead, these skin names were found: dark, light. Resolve this error by ensuring a directory named Dark exists at C:\path\to\skin_directory.

3.0.3 includes code that runs the first time you run the new version that checks for this scenario and automatically fixes it if necessary.

Upgrading from 2.6 may result in duplicate sets of tags

When upgrading from a 2.6 gallery where media objects had keywords imported from image metadata, those media objects may end up with two sets of tags settings. You’ll know you’re affected if the right pane shows the heading TAGS twice.

Version 3.0.3 now imports tags correctly from a 2.6 backup file. In addition, the first time you run it, special code runs that looks for duplicate tag records and automatically deletes them if found.

Slide show type on Gallery Control Settings page not inheriting from gallery setting

This was a minor bug that was easy to fix. The slide show type setting on the Gallery Control Settings page defaults to Inline, while the same setting on the Gallery Settings page defaults to FullScreen. The setting on the GCS page now inherits from the gallery setting.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Gallery Server Pro 3.0.2 Released

Today we released 3.0.2, containing 8 enhancements and 31 bug fixes. New features include a new default search option optimized for titles and captions, improvements to the naming of optimized images, and more.

This release is a free upgrade to 3.0 license holders. Upgrading is easy – just copy the files from the upgrade package over your existing web application. Installations and upgrades for other scenarios are in the Quick Start Guide.

New search option

The search window now allows you to search the title and caption fields:

3.0.2_blog1

Previously, the only way to search these fields was to select the Everything category, which has a pretty high performance cost and can take a long time for galleries with hundreds of thousands of objects.

Searching by title/caption is now also the default, as we expect it is the more common usage scenario.

Copy from a read-only gallery

Some users have requested the ability to copy media objects from a read-only gallery to another gallery. Previously, this was not supported. This ability helps enable the use case where you have a private and public gallery. For example, your private gallery might be a read-only view of your personal media collection. The public gallery is a curated set of media objects from your private gallery suitable for your audience. You periodically copy the desired items from your private gallery to your public gallery.

Note that you must be a gallery or site admin in the destination gallery to use this feature.

Enable password retrieval

In 3.0.0 and 3.0.1, the ability for users to request their password to be e-mailed to them was inadvertently turned off. This has now been restored as a default configuration setting.

This new setting applies only for new installations. To enable password retrieval for upgrades, open web.config and change the value of enablePasswordRetrieval to “true”.

Matching filenames

In versions earlier than 3.0.2, optimized images were created with the .jpeg extension, even if the original file’s extension ended in .jpg. If a user then deleted the original file using the Delete original files task, the optimized version was renamed to match the original, *except* for the extension, which retained the .jpeg value.

This is all fine and dandy, but it presented a problem for users synchronizing files between locations using a program like SyncBack. For example, let’s say you have 50 GB of photos you want to share with the world. Your web hosting company might not be happy with that much data on their servers, so you want to let Gallery Server Pro delete the original files from the web server once the web-optimized ones are created. So you set up SyncBack on your home PC to sync your media library with your hosted web server. You use GSP’s sync function to build media objects from the files and then delete the original files to clear up server space.

So far, so good, and you could have done this with earlier versions. But you want SyncBack to run periodically to keep your local library sync’d with your web-hosted library. When SyncBack runs, it won’t find any matches on the server for the local photos because the files on the server now all end in .jpeg and your originals end in .jpg. So it copies the entire 50 GB up again. Not cool.

3.0.2 now ensures that the web-optimized files are given the same name as the original file during the delete original files operation, thus allowing file syncing programs to continue matching up files based on their names.

BUG FIX: Gallery control settings occasionally reset or gallery assigned to another gallery

I’ve been trying to solve this one for a long time, and I finally figured it out. What happens is that the options on the Gallery Control Settings page are occasionally reset to their default values. Or, in other cases, a page that has been assigned to a particular gallery may get re-assigned to the default gallery.

The issue was caused by code that was not thread-safe, resulting in a code path that wiped out the gallery control settings when two threads tried to access the same chunk of code. It is now fixed and I hope I never see this issue again.

BUG FIX: Album titles not appearing in HTML title element

Prior to 3.0, the HTML title tag was dynamically assigned to the title of the current album, but in 3.0.0 and 3.0.1, default.aspx included a hard-coded <title> element set to ‘Media Gallery’. This prevented to the auto-title code from running, resulting in every page in your gallery having the same generic title. Most browsers use this title as the name on the tab, as seen here in Safari:

3.0.2_blog2

In 3.0.2 the hard-coded title element in default.aspx was removed, allowing the gallery to auto-generate this value to the name of the current album:

3.0.2_blog3

If you prefer the original behavior or would like to use your own title, open default.aspx and add a <title> element to the <head> tag with the desired text:

<title>Media Gallery</title>

List of all enhancements

View detailed report of enhancements

  • New default search option for title/caption
  • Allow copying from a read-only gallery to a read/write gallery
  • Allow backup/restore functionality after trial period expires
  • Show improved error message during 2.6 => 3.0 migration
  • Allow ability to cancel all pending video/audio conversions
  • Enable password retrieval by default
  • Filename of optimized image file should match original file after original is deleted
  • New media objects may not appear right away after a sync

List of all bug fixes

View detailed report of bug fixes

  • Gallery control settings occasionally reset or gallery assigned to another gallery
  • Tooltip message incorrect on site settings page
  • Apostrophe in tag/person not supported
  • Tooltip over thumbnail title is truncated after apostrophe
  • Cannot log in from create account page
  • Error creating gallery when current gallery has read-only media objects path
  • Concurrency error may occur when retrieving galleries
  • Cannot synchronize more than one object when metadata extraction is disabled
  • Album titles not appearing in HTML title element
  • Synchronization error when directory names differ by case
  • Cannot restore membership only
  • User may not be able to delete their user album or account
  • "Insufficient permission" message shown to user on create account page
  • New user may receive message 'Your account does not have permission to make changes to roles'
  • List of roles resets to filtered view after adding or deleting a role
  • Changing album title to empty string results in a silent HTTP 500 error
  • Error on site settings page when skin directory contains capital letters
  • Cannot assign user as owner of an album whose title contains a comma
  • Null reference exception when creating an album with no parent album selected
  • 'Also apply watermark to thumbnails' setting should be disabled when parent setting is unchecked
  • User may be able to see albums in breadcrumb menu she does not have access to
  • Error may occur while logging error thrown by ImageMagick (convert.exe)
  • After deleting a media object, view resets to first media object instead of sibling
  • Duration on video & audio page sometimes incorrectly calculated
  • Search results do not allow downloading original file
  • Sync fails when ImageMagick creates corrupt file
  • Move/copy toolbar buttons generate an error when browsing search results
  • Input focus reset when message box auto-disappears
  • Media files are deleted during gallery deletion
  • Tag/people auto-suggest not working for less-privileged users
  • Cancelling an "in progress" encoding leaves the encoding engine unable to process other media items

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Gallery Server Pro Binary Pack Updated

Today we released an updated version of the Gallery Server Pro Binary Pack. It contains the latest versions of three open source utilities that give you advanced gallery functionality such as audio/video encoding and video, PDF, and EPS thumbnail generation. They are ImageMagick 6.8.6, FFmpeg 2.0, and GhostScript 9.10.

To update your gallery, download the Binary Pack, extract the contents from the zip file, and copy convert.exe and ffmpeg.exe over the existing files in the bin directory of your web application. GhostScript is updated by copying gs910w32.exe in the GhostScript directory to your web server and then running it. If you are using a web hosting company, you likely aren’t allowed to run executables on the server. In this case, the best you can do is create a support ticket to ask them to do it.