Update

During one upload I happened to notice the bottom of the Upload Photos page below the Cancel button was getting populated with thumbnails of the photos I was uploading. It wasn't entirely accurate as the number of thumbnails was not the same as the number of files uploaded so that when the upload finished there were 5 fewer thumbnails than actual photos uploaded.

When the upload completed a status page was displayed which included a button to click on to invoke the Batch Manager with uploaded photos in the caddie. However, the number of photos reported as uploaded and placed in the caddie was the number of thumbnails and not the number of photos actually uploaded. When I looked in the target album I uploaded to all the photos were in there.

So apart from the mis-count and incomplete population of the caddie I imagine this is the way it is supposed to work and that something is causing the upload process to terminate uncleanly most of the time.

I don't know that I did anything different from any of the other times I uploaded photos. And most times since that upload the behaviour has been the same as me and the OP have described it.

I was wondering if this a browser-related issue but I have no idea what. I realised the OP said they are using Chrome but I am using Edge 131.0.2903.146  So I tried running uploads in  Edge, Chrome, Duck Duck Go, and Ghostery browsers. All but one upload attempt reproduced the problem.

The one that did partially work was using Edge but had slightly different results - no thumbnails displayed, and no upload status page with button to go to batch manager. In the album there were only 22 of the 28 files uploaded. In a warning banner on the Admin page there was a message saying there were 6 orphans - I clicked on the message and it took me to the batch manager but it did not display thumbnails of the orphan photos so I was unable to select them to move them into an album. The only option I could take was to click on 'Delete 6 orphan photos' directly under the Pre-defined filter drop down list which at first appeared to do nothing but when going to the admin dashboard the warning banner was gone and back in the batch manager the 'Delete 6 orphan photos' was also gone, so I can only assume they were actually deleted but got no confirmation of this.

I think by testing in different browsers I have eliminated the possibility this is a browser problem. It seems like if none of the thumbnails get rendered the upload process doesn't complete so the status page doesn't display and there's nothing put into the batch manager caddie. If some of the thumbnails get rendered then the process does complete but the count of uploaded photos only shows the number of thumbnails, the caddie is only populated with the photos whose thumbnails were rendered and orphans might get reported on the Admin dashboard but cannot be added to albums via the batch manager and can only be deleted.

So perhaps this is a problem on the server serving the pages? In case it is relevant the hosted platform I am using runs Apache 2.4.62. I also tried to attach a pdf with the configuration details of the PHP version but I don't see a way to add and attachment here. It's long so I don't really want to paste it into this post if it's not relevant but will do it in a separate post if anybody thinks it might be relevant.

I really like Piwigo but because of the upload issues I am experiencing I'm kind of nervous I might at some point lose photos without realising it. I'm a tech novice and don't really understand web technology very well so if any of the developers familiar with the uploading code are reading this and can suggest any diagnostic steps I can take or information I need to provide their help would be much appreciated.

Andy

SOLVED! 


OK I think I've stumbled on the cause of the problem.

Long story short, I think it was caused by  a mis-mapping of metadata in local/config/config.inc.php. I had mapping for both use_iptc and show_iptc. I decided to remove show_iptc mapping because the Manage Properties Photos plug-in achieves the same result. I do still want to import some metadata into the Piwigo database columns but I decided to change which ones I mapped. In doing so I must have corrected the mis-mapping.

Every upload I have done since making these changes has generated thumbnails, tags etc for every file in the upload set and has finished cleanly with the upload status details and the button to go to the batch manager.

Although the mapping specifications parsed OK when I saved them in the Local Files Editor, I'm guessing that when I ran an upload the code was throwing errors under the cover which caused the process to silently terminate or just hang with only some of the indexing data committed to the database. And on those occasions when thumbnails for some of the photos did get generated and the upload terminated normally maybe that was because those files did not contain metadata specified in the mapping and so they uploaded cleanly while others in the same batch didn't, hence the mismatch between number of thumbnails and number of files uploaded.

The real proof would be for me to re-instate the the previous mapping and run another upload to see if the problem resurfaces and maybe even try to diagnose exactly what the mapping error was. But life is too short and I really want to get on with populating my Piwigo gallery.

So in the end we can probably put this down to user error but I thought I'd end my posts to this topic by describing what fixed the issue for me in case others with the same problem are looking for possible causes.