Hello Basilio,
Maybe you could try this.
Having the Admin Tools plugin installed, you display the album where you want to put the photos.
Then, on top oof your screen, in the admin tools top bar, you click on the Add photo link.
Then the web  upload form will open.
You choose the photos from your computer either by exploring your disks or by drag-and-drop. You may do it for several photos at a time.
You launch the upload and when you are done, the photos should be in the chosen album since you started from it.

Thank you for your help. I was out of electricity due to recent russian missile attacks on us, civilians. So, a little delay with the feedback.

Katryne, photos should be there, but they are not there for some reason that I cannot get.

eRack, I've just uploaded a photo to give it one more try. Hopefully it will get into the proper album eventually. Though it's now there yet. I will let you know what happens later. By the way, should I have installed any external packages for the lounge feature to operate correctly?

Updated: the photo is not in the album still (~7 hours since uploading), look like it doesn't work like it`s intended or maybe some misconfiguration from my side. I don't have a clue what's happening.

Last edited by basilio (2024-04-08 09:32:23)

It looks like something wrong is happening with the attribution of the uploaded file. In the batch manager it appears as an orphan in the predefined filter field. But refreshing it adds no file to selection. So it is not orphaned really. And it should not be, as I pointed it to some album when uploading. Meantime, applying the "with no virtual album" filter adds the recently uploaded file to selection. And I can associate or move it to any album. After that, it appears in selected album.

Could it be that attribution for virtual albums for uploading photos is broken somehow? As when syncing ftp uploaded photos work flawlessly.

When I try to upload a photo to the real album through the form, everything remains just the same. Only ftp sync works like expected.
Also, the documentation is very scarce. I could not find how to set up what kind of albums to use, real or virtual. Meantime, both type of albums coexist on my testing Piwigo installation without any issues. Except this problem with uploading photos. The only issue is that the uploading form cannot hold the information about the album until the end of the transaction or is failing to pass it to the right place. And thus I have to explicitly assign those photos to albums one more time in batch manager.

Fwiw, physical folder ("ftp") albums and virtual albums can peacefully coexist, but now that basillo mentioned, you are not trying to web upload a photo and assign it into a physical album, are you? That probably won't work.

Just for the record. I have found the reason of this wrong behavior finally.

The Smart Albums plugin somehow breaks the uploading feature of Piwigo. And more than that, removing that broken plugin does not restore the Piwigo instance to the previous state. Your Piwigo get poisoned, and you lose the feature of uploading your pictures permanently. To be more precise, after uploading you will have to assign the album manually for every picture as Piwigo will treat it as the orphan for some unknown reason. Removing the plugin won't help. And I cannot think the other way of repairing my Piwigo that completely reinstalling and repopulating it. If I had a backup copy before this plugin I would be more happy I think. So pity.

One more update. Not so sad for this time. I just have revealed to myself that after "virtualizing" my images I can still use physical albums. Though, I can only upload photos to such albums with synchronization tool. If using web interface or android app, they get to correct albums but put in "upload". Anyway, I still can symlink folders with my archived photos from NAS to "galleries", organize its structure as I like, keep it current and it will work.

And maybe it is still not perfect, but it is the best available solution that works on my primitive Orange Pi hardware. Thank you, devs.

PS It might be worth to mention somewhere in SmartAlbums plugin description that it is not fully compatible with physical albums and needs virtualization of the photo library to play nicely.

PPS To admin: you can mark this topic as solved :)

Last edited by basilio (2024-08-23 12:23:40)