Albums: Pictures are suddenly all the same

[lastzero]

A small number of users report that all their albums "suddenly" have the same pictures:

• All albums suddenly have the same images #3245

We have created this issue to find the root cause and implement code changes if needed. Since most users, including our team, have never had a problem like this, we suspect it is something very specific that cannot be found easily.

In order to reproduce the reported behavior, we therefore need to ask for your help:

1. What types of albums are affected (regular albums, folders, calendar months, states, moments)? Have their titles or other attributes changed as well?
2. Did you upgrade from a previous version? If so, which version and which version are you using now?
3. Did you previously use another database type or version, like MySQL or SQLite? If so, please provide details and what database you are using now.
4. Did you already try performing a rescan of your library? If it's just a database index issue, for example after a schema migration, that should fix it.
5. Are you using any third party apps or scripts provided by our community?
6. Can you remember the last actions (like adding pictures to an album) before the problem occurred?

If you are using Docker Compose with our default configuration, the following will create an SQL dump of your album-related database tables (without anything else) so we can use them for debugging your problem:

docker compose exec -T photoprism mysqldump -u photoprism -p photoprism albums photos_albums > dump.sql 

Please note:

• you need to manually enter the password specified in the environment variable MARIADB_PASSWORD, see your docker-compose.yml
• if you are not using Docker Compose or have changed the default container, database, or username, you will need to modify the command accordingly

Dumps and sample files can be emailed directly to us so you don't have to post them publicly:

👉 https://www.photoprism.app/contact

Any help in providing a solution is greatly appreciated, as it allows our team to work on other issues that our community is waiting for. Thank you very much!

[lastzero]

My best guess is that this is either a database migration issue after upgrading to a newer version, or a problem with updating the album_filter column in the albums table. So far I haven`t found any queries in our current codebase that could cause this behavior, so it might as well be fixed already.

[barry-luijten]

Hi, I was one of the users experiencing this. I am not sure what exactly caused this to happen, but the only change I made was an upgrade from MariaDB from 10.10 to 10.11.
Besides having the problem that all albums (album_type = 'album') showed the same set of unrelated pictures, my album names were also reset to the same name January 2019 in my case.
I found a set of yml files in this directory: storage/albums/album, which turned out to be backups of my album definitions (as @lastzero pointed out to me in the discussion). These turned out to be a life saver.
Then I explored the database table albums and noticed that the field album_filter for most of my album records contained a value, while a test album that I created after noticing the problem, didn't. The field contained this string: path:2016/10 public:true.
The yml files are named after the uid of the album, and contained the original title of my albums. Using that information and a small shell script, I was able to generate a set of SQL statements to update my malformed album records in this format:
UPDATE albums SET album_title = 'Original Title', album_filter = '' WHERE album_uid = 'uid of album';
After this, my albums were restored in their original state! Setting the album_filter field to an empty string fixed the issue of showing the wrong pictures when opening the album.
I'm still curious what caused this, because I suspect that the DB upgrade has little to do with it. I think the issue happened before that and I simply noticed it after the upgrade.
PS. I'm running this version of Photoprism (docker container) since it's release: Build 221118-e58fee0fb

[lastzero]

Thanks for your feedback! Since we haven't tested with 10.11 yet, there is a small risk. See our documentation:

We recommend not using the :latest tag for the MariaDB Docker image and to upgrade manually by changing the tag once we had a chance to test a new major version.

For example, it is possible that the error codes have changed so that our library no longer recognizes not found errors and just returns a generic error, which could change the application logic. I've changed the albums error handling with the last commit to make sure this doesn't happen.

[lastzero]

An updated development preview and public demo will be available for testing soon. Of course, if you're not sure how to reproduce this, it can be difficult to test if the changes are helpful or not...

[lastzero]

@barry-luijten Are you using our MariaDB config example at https://dl.photoprism.app/docker/docker-compose.yml or does your server not only have a different version but also different settings, for example for query compatibility?

[barry-luijten]

@lastzero : Yes, I'm using the exact same command and environment variables in my database container.
I have been trying to reproduce the issue, but failed so far. I remembered a few more things I did before the issue occurred:

1. I searched for specific pictures from a certain month, which might have something to do with my albums being renamed to "January 2019", because that was the exact search term I used.
2. I had "experimental features" turned on. I turned them off after noticing the problems, but that did not help of course. It's still unclear though what features this option exactly unlocks.

I can try to turn experimental features "on" again and perform the search. I think it's only useful to test the preview version if I can reproduce the problem ;)

Thanks for your quick response and help so far!