Wrong meta data imported and wrong sorting

Same bug here. It seems that the bug is partly fixed simply if you remove the exclamation mark at line 514 of file lib/meta.php

if (!$date_time) $date_time = $this->exif_date2ts($date_time);
should become
if ($date_time) $date_time = $this->exif_date2ts($date_time);

If it’s really the fix, you should quickly release a version at least for fix this bug. I think it’s anormal to annoy thousands of persons just because of one wrong character !

Also, I think you should break the foreach loop (line 508) as soon as you found the correct information, ie just after the line 510.

Sorry to be so hard, but for me, the current code is really ugly. Nothing is right. The “FileDateTime” tag is not in the $this->exif_data[‘EXIF’] array as others but in $this->exif_data[‘FILE’]. And this tag is not in the same format as the other two, so you can’t apply exif_date2ts because it’s already a timestamp.

And I think it is the same in almost all the plugin code (for example, filter hooks are not really at useful places). Nextgen Gallery is a quite good plugin in front-end for the users, but I think the code behind needs a good revision. Why not place the project on a public repository such as GitHub or Sourceforge, so that everyone can participate, follow the development, fork the project … ?

@martin Bay , @wpyoda,

We’re seriously considering a v1.9.13, if we’re able to get this put together and stable quickly, we are aiming for within the next week or two. We’ll keep you posted.

@wpyoda, this is a large part of v2.0, is a major revision of a lot of legacy code. We’ve cleaned up quite a bit. v2.0 should be a smoother ride. ??

If any of you have any further questions or concerns, let me know. We know this incorrect date is quite annoying and we’re working hard to get a solid fix to you all as soon as possible. We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding. We want everything that is released to be as stable and error free as possible.

Best,
–Becky

When the v1.9.13 release is ready?

Thxs!

We’re working on it right now, will be doing a quick test to confirm stability and then we’ll be releasing it to the public. Hopefully by the end of this week we’ll have it ready for you all. ??

Thxs for support !!!

Would really like an update… 2 weeks out, 1 week out…how close are we?
Is it patch or a new version update?
Such a shame to have so many recent issues with such a popular plugin.

@oregon – We apologize for the delay. We want to ensure this update is stable and runs smooth. As you know, NextGEN Gallery is a very robust plugin with a lot of moving pieces. During development, sometimes fixing one piece of functionality can negatively effect another piece of the plugin. We aspire to get everything fixed and ready by a certain date, but unfortunately sometimes there are delays in development. Hopefully we’ll have something available for you all within the next few days. We appreciate your patience and understanding. ??

Best,
-Becky

Been following this thread for a while now. I don’t want to open my new blog site until this is fixed as the sites main purpose is photo sharing.
I appreciate this is free software, and I really do appreciate the time and effort people put in.
It would be nice to know an update on the time frame though. Are we waiting on new version 2.0? Are we expecting a patch from 1.9.12 to 1.9.13? Are we expecting both?
I haven’t submitted a bug report, do I need to if it’s being worked on?

Curious what everyone else is doing to work around this? Have you gone back to a previous version, if so which one? Have you added your own code? Or are you just manually editing the DB after importing the images?

I did take a look at the function get_date_time() in lib/meta.php and noticed it hasn’t changed for a few versions now, so either it’s not to blame or this bug has been there for more than just v.1.9.12
I’m always interested to see how developers write their code, maybe look to make small amendments, but this lot just cooks my head. I hope Becky is right in that v.2.0 will be tidied up somewhat ??

Cheers.

@ecomlearning
My personal site is a photo-blog also, and for the last few months I’ve been correcting this time/date error manually by using phpMyAdmin to directly edit the database and change this value to the correct one. (Look for wp_ngg_pictures, unless you’ve changed the prefix to something other than wp_ .)

Since I only post a few images a week, this isn’t a terrible hassle for me – but considering that the whole WP experience is supposed to be easy to use for non-geeks, it isn’t something you should expect a “normal” user to have to mess with. Right now, if someone ask me to setup a photo-gallery for them to load hundreds of images that need to be sorted by date in any way … I don’t know what I’d do unless it would be to look for an alternative to NGG – I’d really hate to tell them “My favorite one – that’s long been considered one of the best – has been broken for months now and thinks every image you feed it was created on January 1st, 1970”

I’m not really complaining though – the developers have been good to comment here and keep us assured that a fix is on the way, and I appreciate that at least they appreciate the problem. But the sad part is that this will keep some folks from adopting this plug-in while it still has the problem – and once they’ve gone with another gallery system, they probably won’t be back.

Personally, I have no desire to try and port over 500 images into a new system and update almost as many posts – so I wait patiently and keep a shortcut to phpMyAdmin handy.

Like Snow White said when she dropped her film off to be developed: “Some day my prints will come”. (All taken by a Kodak Instamatic on New Years Day of 1970!)

@markcorder I appreciate the tips. I’m quite happy navigating the WP DB but as you point out, more than a handful a day becomes a PITA.

I’m not so concerned about the ordering of images as the date that’s displayed on the site. I edit the meta in Adobe Lightroom – title, description, date/time (to correct if necessary) etc. I have modified the lightbox display so the caption below each image contains the date, title and description. Took a bit of head scratching to work out it wasn’t my hack or how I was exporting & uploading images that was breaking the date.

PS – I hope v2.0 makes it easier to hack these functions in a child theme. As it is, the only way I have it working is to modify the source of the plugin itself which is far from ideal and goes against all best practice.

Cheers.

@ecomlearning: I just replaced lib/meta.php with the one from version 1.9.10 – the upload works fine ever since. However, the pictures already uploaded with 1.9.12 I had to delete and upload again (still faster than correcting the DB entries). Hope that helps you.

@sficht – that sounds like a plan, maybe use lib/meta.php 1.9.10 while uploading (large numbers of images but not very often I think) and then revert to 1.9.12 for normal operation?
I’ll compare the two files to see what else changed apart from this function.

I bet there’s a new version to patch this by the I time figure this all out though ??

Cheers for the help, appreciate it.

I run the whole thing on 1.9.12 with just lib/meta.php replaced with the one from the 1.9.10 version – so far I found nothing that made any trouble in this combination. Good luck.

@sficht ah well, in that case I’ll take your word for it and do that.
Great, even easier!

We’ve pushed out an update today that resolved the date meta data issue.

For images you’ve already uploaded, you can go to any gallery, select the images, select “Import Meta” from the drop down, and click apply. It will re-import meta data and correct any dates.

I want to personally apologize for the long delay in releasing this fix. It wasn’t that hard a fix. For what it’s worth, we had just been planning to fix it with 2.0, and we keep thinking that was around the corner, but it’s obviously taking longer than expected.

As many of you noted, we should have pushed a small fix out for this immediately.

Let us know if you have any further issues on this.

Thanks.
Erick
Founder, Photocrati