This is another article from Farnam Street, and I confess up until a few days ago, I’d never heard of them. Run by a guy named Shane Parrish, he’s based here in Ottawa. Some really fascinating stuff on there, with decent curation and a lot of links. This article highlights that:
Not all of our grand schemes turn out like we planned. In fact, sometimes things go horribly awry. In this article, we tackle unintended consequences and how to minimize them in our own decision making.
You might think that the article is going to be about train wreck ideas or the butterfly effect causing tsunamis. Not really. In fact, I would say it is more about linear thinking from good intentions to good outcomes, without taking into account side effects. Some unknown, some unforeseeable, some just missed because they stopped thinking early. The article has a great quote from a book by William A. Sherden:
Sometimes unintended consequences are catastrophic, sometimes beneficial. Occasionally their impacts are imperceptible, at other times colossal. Large events frequently have a number of unintended consequences, but even small events can trigger them. There are numerous instances of purposeful deeds completely backfiring, causing the exact opposite of what was intended.
The conclusion is simple — systems thinking or second-order thinking is needed, but the article doesn’t pay much attention to the fact that often the culprit lies in defining the system too narrowly, when in fact the small system is part of a larger system, and it is the larger system that often has the other effects (like the examples of releasing a predator into a land to control one local population, not realizing that the predator will spread into the larger system). What I do like is the idea that sometimes the failure is in over-estimating the size of the system, assuming there are too many variables, and thus not trying at all to figure out ancillary effects.
Yet, if we know they exist (or in hindsight think we should have), the article explains some of the most common reasons:
Sociologist Robert K. Merton has identified five potential causes of consequences we failed to see:
Our ignorance of the precise manner in which systems work.
Analytical errors or a failure to use Bayesian thinking (not updating our beliefs in light of new information).
Focusing on short-term gain while forgetting long-term consequences.
The requirement for or prohibition of certain actions, despite the potential long-term results.
The creation of self-defeating prophecies (for example, due to worry about inflation, a central bank announces that it will take drastic action, thereby accidentally causing crippling deflation amidst the panic).
However, the article goes even further, adding in over-reliance on models and predictions (mistaking the map for the territory), survivorship bias, the compounding effect of consequences, denial, failure to account for base rates, curiosity, or the tendency to want to do something.
If you’re interested in goals and theory the way I am, then an article about “cross-training for the mind” and different ways of thinking in various disciplines is like catnip. When I saw the article, and that it was going to work through 113 different mental models, I couldn’t NOT click on that bait. In fact, their goal in the article is based on the following:
The overarching goal is to build a powerful “tree” of the mind with strong and deep roots, a massive trunk, and lots of sturdy branches. We use this tree to hang the “leaves” of experience we acquire, directly and vicariously, throughout our lifetimes: the scenarios, decisions, problems, and solutions arising in any human life.
The more mental models you have, the more roots and branches you have to build on. What types of models? How about:
General Thinking Concepts (11)
Inversion
Falsification / Confirmation Bias
Circle of Competence
The Principle of Parsimony (Occam’s Razor)
Hanlon’s Razor
Second-Order Thinking
The Map Is Not the Territory
Thought Experiments
Mr. Market
Probabilistic Thinking (See also: Numeracy/Bayesian Updating)
Default Status
Numeracy (14)
Permutations and Combinations
Algebraic Equivalence
Randomness
Stochastic Processes (Poisson, Markov, Random Walk)
Compounding
Multiplying by Zero
Churn
Law of Large Numbers
Bell Curve/Normal Distribution
Power Laws
Fat-Tailed Processes (Extremistan)
Bayesian Updating
Regression to the Mean
Order of Magnitude
Systems (22)
Scale
Law of Diminishing Returns
Pareto Principle
Feedback Loops (and Homeostasis)
Chaos Dynamics (Sensitivity to Initial Conditions)
Preferential Attachment (Cumulative Advantage)
Emergence
Irreducibility
Tragedy of the Commons
Gresham’s Law
Algorithms
Fragility – Robustness – Antifragility
Backup Systems/Redundancy
Margin of Safety
Criticality
Network Effects
Black Swan
Via Negativa – Omission/Removal/Avoidance of Harm
The Lindy Effect
Renormalization Group
Spring-loading
Complex Adaptive Systems
Physical World (9)
Laws of Thermodynamics
Reciprocity
Velocity
Relativity
Activation Energy
Catalysts
Leverage
Inertia
Alloying
The Biological World (15)
Incentives
Cooperation (Including Symbiosis)
Tendency to Minimize Energy Output (Mental & Physical)
Adaptation
Evolution by Natural Selection
The Red Queen Effect (Co-evolutionary Arms Race)
Replication
Hierarchical and Other Organizing Instincts
Self-Preservation Instincts
Simple Physiological Reward-Seeking
Exaptation
Extinction
Ecosystems
Niches
Dunbar’s Number
Human Nature & Judgment (23)
Trust
Bias from Incentives
Pavlovian Mere Association
Tendency to Feel Envy & Jealousy
Tendency to Distort Due to Liking/Loving or Disliking/Hating
Denial
Availability Heuristic
Representativeness Heuristic
Failure to Account for Base Rates
Tendency to Stereotype
Failure to See False Conjunctions
Social Proof (Safety in Numbers)
Narrative Instinct
Curiosity Instinct
Language Instinct
First-Conclusion Bias
Tendency to Overgeneralize from Small Samples
Relative Satisfaction/Misery Tendencies
Commitment & Consistency Bias
Hindsight Bias
Sensitivity to Fairness
Tendency to Overestimate Consistency of Behavior (Fundamental Attribution Error)
Influence of Authority
Influence of Stress (Including Breaking Points)
Survivorship Bias
Tendency to Want to Do Something (Fight/Flight, Intervention, Demonstration of Value, etc.)
Microeconomics & Strategy (14)
Opportunity Costs
Creative Destruction
Comparative Advantage
Specialization (Pin Factory)
Seizing the Middle
Trademarks, Patents, and Copyrights
Double-Entry Bookkeeping
Utility (Marginal, Diminishing, Increasing)
Bottlenecks
Prisoner’s Dilemma
Bribery
Arbitrage
Supply and Demand
Scarcity
Military & War (5)
Seeing the Front
Asymmetric Warfare
Two-Front War
Counterinsurgency
Mutually Assured Destruction
The article has lots of links to the models to explain them. It’s like a treasure-trove of mental improvement rabbit-holes. And perhaps the grounds for 113 new blog posts by me as I work through each of them! Mind-blowing.
In my previous posts, I talked about the desire to switch from paying for a commercial photo gallery and instead hosting it on my own site; testing out a bunch of plugins and options to embed the photo gallery directly into my WordPress site (i.e. this blog) rather than hosting separately; figuring out problems with Piwigo plugins to make sure I could get it to work with photos AND video together; and finally working through a bunch of options around theme choices and a challenge with my layouts.
Generally, after all that, it puts me in the world of having a working gallery. Or more accurately, a shell of a gallery. I still have to populate it. This is going to fall into four main phases, and it isn’t exactly “light” work. It is pure, unadulterated grunt duty.
Phase 1: Upload my files
Sure, upload my files. Sounds easy enough, right? But we’re not talking about a click-and-upload solution with one fell swoop. There are some options to do that, but it does mean spending a lot of time to either set up a separate set of files (my stored photos on my harddrive go chronologically, and includes subfolders both for photos I want to upload and subfolders for the “also ran” pics that are either duplicates of other shots, or someone is squinting, or whatever). I do occasionally go back to them looking for good shots where, say, Jacob looks awesome in the photo, but I need to crop out two other people. Not worth the effort for a standard upload, but if I was looking for a good shot of JUST Jacob, then I’ll look through the extra photos too. Which means unlike some ruthless digiterati, I don’t just delete those extra shots. To give you an idea of volume, some of my uploads in a year might be 1000 photos over the course of multiple weddings, trips, day to day events, etc. But that likely represents 3000-4000 photos and videos in total. Call it 1 in 3 or 4 that are good enough to share. Why does that matter? Because I can’t just click a single folder and upload everything in it. 75% of the photos don’t get uploaded, so it’s a bit more manual of a process. They’re all presorted, I’m not redoing that work, but it isn’t as simple as clicking a root folder and uploading everything under it.
I downloaded DigiCam as a photo manager as it has an option for uploading photos directly, but it was only marginally better than doing it by hand in a web browser, with a couple of bad work process things too (dangers of “synching” and losing stuff).
So I’m uploading. Since I’m going back to 2005, plus I have other types of photos in there (memes, comics, HR charts, a few other things that only I can see for work purposes), it will likely top out somewhere around 10K photos and videos by the time I’m done. Stored in approximately 250-400 subfolders, depending on how I organize them.
In my previous post, I was working my way through Piwigo themes but mainly trying to fix a couple of plugin problems for sticky caches and metadata crashing my site. But the main focus of my attention was on choosing an actual theme.
Testing Piwigo – Themes
Did you see in the previous posts where I mentioned there were 47 available themes? Yep, I tried them all. Just to narrow it down to a hopefully small handful that I can work with, for a basic design that isn’t too intrusive and that I can get to work with multiple layouts as needed.
I know I’m going to end up mucking with the template to increase font sizes, but other than that, I’m hoping NOT to play with any setups for colours nor actual font choices. I want the chosen theme to be as close to final as possible. The batch of templates for “no” was relatively straightforward, and for multiple reasons:
Too dark: Templates called “Dark”, “Flop_Mauve”, “Grum Dark II”, “Luciano Amodio”, “Mont Blanc XL”, “Pure_grey_plastic”, “Simple Dark”, “Simple / Simple_grey”, and “Stripped and columns / stripped black bloc”;
Errors in display (video, photo page or main): “Elegant”, “Elegant_slick”, “Stripped”, “Stripped_responsive”, and SimpleNG (no admin.tools display); and,
Problems with layout: “Bootstrap” (banner alignment), “HR_Glass_XL” (basic for photo page), “HR_OS” and “HR_OS_XL” (bit small, too grey), “OS_Glass / OS_Glass_Clear / OS_Glass_dark / OS_Glass_Dark_2” (dark, with confusing photo page), “Kardon” (nice colours but photo page has odd layout), “Modus” (menu layouts too close together), “SakuraBW” (dark, with fonts and sizes too small), and “Versa” (messed up photo page, strange layouts overall, and dark).
Some others were okay, but the colours were just off for me:
Grey dragon — lots of power, but one option is too dark and one is too glaringly white;
Pure_freaky — too strong a background;
Pure_green_nature — too light of colour of green, and the colour of the links is harsh;
Pure_TR_green_nature — background too distracting;
Simple Sunset – dark, but interesting colour of orange for the links;
Simple white — nice layout for EXIF data (to the right, like a sidebar), rest of the layouts and colours were ho hum; and,
SmartPocket — mobile theme, which I think is overkill if I can find a simple layout design that is more ubiquitous.
One of the more interesting ones was Wipi. Strange colours, interesting use of ASCII lines, etc. It looks like it was designed by someone obsessed with ASCII graphics, or maybe the old Space Invaders, but too eclectic and dark for my tastes. Interesting, but no.
Contenders for the theme
In the end, I am left with eight possible themes that would work for my needs, with four strong candidates and four backups. The four strong candidates are “Clear”, P0W0″, “Pure_Autumn”, and “Pure_clear_blue”; the four backups are “BlancMontXL”, “Pure_sky”, “Pure_TR_Clear_Blue”, and “Vertical_White”. Let’s see how they do, starting with the backups.
A. BlancMont XL
This one is dark, which I would normally say no to immediately. There are three reasons though that I would consider it. First, a dark theme works well with astronomy photos, and I’m hoping that area of photography will grow for me in the future. Secondly, it is a pretty slick theme. Nice lines, simple layout, and the configuration is pretty basic. In fact, there are only five options — four to include a page banner on the home page, categories page, picture page, and other pages, and one to use the MontBlancXL icon set. Finally, it has a horizontal menu instead of a sidebar layout. Which makes it possible, but not likely.
B. Pure_sky
This one goes the opposite way from the previous. Light, a medium blue background overall, with clouds dotting the top. The traditional sidebar is there to the left. And that’s not configurable. Which is understandable as there are NO configuration options at all in fact. If you want to tweak anything, you have to start messing with the template. Many of the layouts I looked at want to put a frame around the picture near the end, either directly or through background shifts (i.e. like a zone for photos to separate it from the rest of the template). This one doesn’t, it’s just the photo on a plain blue background. Which works well. It’s a viable option, particularly as it has very low overhead at the top of the theme so the photos show up pretty high up…if you set them to medium or potentially even large, there will be no need to scroll as you go from pic to pic. But again, a bit basic. One thing that does differentiate it from the first one though is the first used a small portion of the screen (limited width), whereas this is fully expansive.
C. Pure_TR_clear_blue
Based on the same layouts and default settings as the “Pure” series, this one is identical to Pure_sky. The only difference is a lighter blue background, with some grey colouring, and no “sky” / “clouds” at the top. A little blander version, but perfectly fine choice if I don’t want the clouds.
D. Vertical white
This layout is quite similar to the Pure Themes, but it goes with some slight tweaks. The background is white, and it’s a bit jarring to have all that white space. Looks fine when the video is at full size or with a horizontal pic at max size, but on a large monitor, not the greatest. Plus the colours of the sidebars is a bit odd (green headings?). I can tweak a bit, but why bother? The Pure ones are closer to where I want to be.
If I had to go with one of the backups, I would choose one of the two Pure themes, just with decision as to whether I want the clouds or not. Probably not. So Pure_TR_Clear_Blue it would be.
For the strong contenders, let’s go through them in the same way.
E. Pure_clear_blue
Also based on the “pure” series, this is identical in functionality and layout to B and C above, just with different colours. The overall background is a light grey, almost dirty white. I eliminated the Grey Dragon theme in the first area because it’s background was shockingly white…this tones down all that white space, and I like it. The blue for the menu bars is almost a light pastel, bordering on grey. Again, a very crisp and clear layout, simple colours, and a better fit than B and C.
F. Clear
The layout is clean, with white and muted blues, very simple. It looks VERY similar to the Pure themes, and in the end, it is a toss up between the previous and this one, very minor questions of colour choices.
My choice so far
At this point, if I had to choose, it would be tough. E & F are better than A-D, so that eliminates the backups. Between the two of Pure Clear Blue and Clear, it’s only minor differences, and I would probably want to ask my wife for some input. Mostly though it’s about dancing on the head of a pin between two very similar themes. It’s the next two where it gets difficult.
G. P0W0
I love this theme, and I can’t entirely decide why. The layout is also very clean and simple, like six of the other seven contenders. In fact, it looks and acts like the rest of the Pure themes. But where the colours went different is where I get confused. I wanted light, right? Well, you can’t get much lighter than the lightest blue, light grey or white, which are all available in the first six contenders. But then I hit this one, the overall separation bars go for dark blue, with a lighter almost purple / mauve tint to the background, and the side bars are darker too. Not “dark” blue, but darker than the other options. But it is crisp and clean, good lines, and I like the colour contrast. In fact, if I went with this option, there are only two things I would want to change — a slight increase in font size for the various texts and perhaps an option to add a banner to the overall header.
So following the logic I’ve laid out so far, I should have a clear winner. Crisp. Clean. Simple. Low overhead. Good colour choices, not dark but not glaringly white either.
H. Pure_autumn
This is the one that confuses me completely, and I think it is because the person who designed it and chose the colours did such a great job of choosing fantastic complementary colours. Sure, of the set of eight, this has the nicest non-bland colour combos, and has been at the top of my list previously.
It goes with a light grey for a background, avoiding the white.
It adds a tree in light grey silhouette, with most of the leaves gone (autumn, get it?).
In the footer, to the right, it goes with a darker grey pile of leaves falling in front and trees in the back.
For the side bar, it goes with multiple shades of soft browns, puce, green, yellow, etc.
It is a great theme. I admire its elegance, I admire the craftsmanship. And there is no doubt that it is a better-looking theme than my previous six (the dark one is a totally different beast).
And yet, I can’t pull the trigger on it. I just don’t feel like the colours are “true” matches with my photos. If I was doing more portfolio stuff, sure, I could add the artistic flare for certain nature shots. But for the average batch of photos, the colours just don’t work.
Where that leaves me
Drum roll please….we have a winner! P0W0 is my choice.
But the saying about the “best laid plans of mice and men” comes to mind. I checked the format with my wife, made some tweaks, it all seemed good. Right up until I started editing some info in the template. I was fine with the colours, and basic layout, so that was good. The fonts were a bit small, yet easy to go into LocalFilesEditor and change the CSS a bit. Then when I was changing the Description of one of my photos, I noticed something odd. There are three active “fields” that present me with the opportunity for captions:
a. The filename — I know, I know, it usually doesn’t have anything descriptive in it, so it looks more like IMAGE_0027.JPG for example. But I *could* rename it “Skating on the canal #01”, 02, 03, 04, for example. I prefer to leave the original filename as untouched as possible, but it’s an option;
b. The title — Piwigo calls it “Title” in the internal editing, or “name” on some of the popups. When I uploaded the pictures, it put the filename there as the default. It kind of needs SOMETHING for a name, I’m not sure you can leave it blank. On the thumbnails page, it shows this field as a caption under each photo (at least in most themes) but on the photo page, it moves to the breadcrumb row; and,
c. The description — this only appears on the final photo page, and shows up under the photo.
Which basically means that if I like having “captions” below the photo, then here’s my dilemma:
if I put the caption in the filename, it never shows up;
if I put the caption in the title/name, it shows up on the thumbnails page in the right spot, under the photo (yay!), but on the photo page, it moves to the breadcrumb (boo); and,
if I put the caption in the description, it shows up on the photo page in the right spot, under the photo (yay), but on the thumbnails page, it doesn’t show up at all (boo).
End result? I either have to not have a caption on one of the two areas, have a stupid caption in one of the areas (looking like a filename), or put the caption in BOTH the title/name and description. Double the work, double the pain.
Or…maybe…I could edit the P0W0 theme to put the title or description in both the Thumbnail and Photo pages under the photo? Maybe not. It appears that is based on the core PHP files of Piwigo, it’s not a separate template (TPL) file. Well, crud.
Sooooo, since I want to do something other than entering the captions twice for each photo, what if I took a DIFFERENT theme, one that would allow me extra configurations, and then edit their CSS to change the colours to look like P0W0? In other words, what if I took a theme I rejected (previous post) as being too dark / weird / unusual, or colours (above) but which puts captions in the right place, and then I could just focus on fixing the colour parts I don’t like?
Worth a consideration, at least, right?
Re-testing themes for titles/descriptions
All of the PURE themes were out, right from the start. Like P0W0, there is no real config and it puts everything the same place P0W0 does. So no help there. Nine themes down. Other themes with the same problem include: Clear; Dark; 3 x HR; 5 x OS; Kardon; Grum_dark_II; Sakura_BW; 5 x Simple; Sylvie; Versa; Vertical_white; Wipi; SmartPocket; BlancMontXL; MontblancXL; and Modus.
Elegant and Elegant_slick were different…it got rid of the thumbnail page, and put it under the photo as a carousel/slide row. The Description went ABOVE the photo (not under), but each of the little thumbnails had both title and description on them when you ran the mouse over. Interesting, they had some other basic configs but meh.
Flopmauve + Luciano also merged title and description on the thumbnails page (which would mean I could use one or the other) but it was only on mouseover.
GreyDragon takes a very different approach to layouts, and uses tabs for lots of things. Not entirely sold on it, but it comes with a HUGE set of configurable options. Lots of good things in there, none of which solves my caption problem, at least not without mouseovers or popups.
The three Stripped themes weren’t all created equal, and if I dumped the responsive and columns one, the remaining “default” one was actually great for solving the problem — on the config settings, there was a clear option to specify what to put below the photo — a caption of the Title/name field or the Description field. Perfect, right? Except it messed up the album and thumbnail pages, and no matter what I did to them, I couldn’t get it off a pre-set five columns per page layout.
Which leaves me either sticking with P0WO or going with Bootstrap Darkroom. Bootstrap Darkroom? Yeah, it actually comes the closest. And with a bit of tweaking, I got the colours and layouts looking correct. I didn’t find any solution in the template other than pasting the info twice (title and description), but it’s working. Mostly though I just couldn’t resist the ExIf sidebar for the layout.
In my previous two posts, I talked about the history of my approach to having an online photo gallery with videos, ranging from self-hosted with embedded videos to a full commercial account with SmugMug, and the desire to repatriate the files back to my main website. WordPress didn’t have much in the way of working options, and so I moved on to Piwigo again.
Testing Piwigo – the configuration
Piwigo is a standalone app that Softaculous installs pretty well from scratch on my host, no muss, no fuss. And I’ve used it before with a fair amount of success — I had it up and running with 3000+ photos and videos at one point, so it must have met my needs. I installed it on my site again, chose all the basic plugins that I used about three years ago, tweaked the basics, and uploaded three photos and a video as test subjects.
The video played perfectly, right out of the gate. The photos weren’t anything to write home about, but I was just testing it. Next up would be my theme selection, and then I would go back and do a full tweak of all the plugins, menus and settings. I tried one or two themes, all good. I was pretty sure where I would end up, but it’s been three years, maybe something else would catch my eye in the tweaks since then.
I tried a theme called BootStrap, decided it was too dark, went back to a clear theme, and my site CRASHED. It would NOT load the main page anymore. I could get into the administration pages on the back-end, but it would NOT show me the front page. It was throwing errors on my theme. But I was using the default theme I had used earlier…could the other theme have corrupted my install? How? That’s weird.
So I did what every good administrator does. I deactivated all my plugins, reinstalled the themes, and checked the main page. Voila, no problem, it loads. Problem solved, right?
Nope, I reactivated a couple of plugins, and it crashed again. A plugin called Admin.Tools was causing the conflict and was crashing the site. The plugin has been around for ages, tested and used by thousands, always worked, and now it was CONFLICTING? It worked fine fifteen minutes before. I started searching online to see if anyone else had a problem with Admin.Tools and found someone who did. It was slightly different from mine, but they were mostly getting the same error. Activate Admin.Tools, and the template was missing. But it couldn’t be missing, it looked like a conflict. Hmm. Okay, I deactivated it, tested a few other things.
And suddenly my VIDEOS WOULDN’T LOAD. I don’t mean they wouldn’t play, I mean I couldn’t even LOAD the PAGE they were on where I would press play. WTF? It was LITERALLY working just TEN MINUTES BEFORE! GRRRRRR. I searched online for the new error message, and while lots of people seemed to get the same error occasionally, their situation was very different from mine.
I posted the full details on the Piwigo forum and hoped for the best. Maybe someone would know why, and more importantly, be able to tell me if completely blowing it off the system and reinstalling it was worth a shot.
Piwigo problem with Admin.Tools
I was getting the following error in Piwigo:
Warning: include(/themeconf.inc.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/polywogg/public_html/pandafamily/include/template.class.php on line 1156
Warning: include(): Failed opening ‘/themeconf.inc.php’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/opt/alt/php70/usr/share/pear’) in /home/polywogg/public_html/pandafamily/include/template.class.php on line 1156
Fatal error: Uncaught –> Smarty: Unable to load template file ‘menubar.tpl’ <– thrown in /home/polywogg/public_html/pandafamily/include/smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_internal_template.php on line 139
On the forum, a local genius named Flop25 who has helped i.e. saved me in the past and often goes above and beyond the call of duty suggested that instead of doing a completely new install, I could just re-upload some key files over top of the existing install, a little easier. He also suggested that it looked like a problem finding the template, perhaps due to a caching problem.
Which got me thinking. A caching problem? Missing template? It wasn’t a conflict? Hmm…wait a minute. Admin.Tools lets you switch between themes easily on the front end so you can see what the various themes look like live. But it has a sticky setting. Just because I change something on the backend, the Admin.Tools remembers what the last theme chosen was on the front end. And shows you that. Which in this case would have been something like BootStrap. Which I tried, didn’t like, deactivated, and then, DELETED. Except Admin.Tools was keeping the sticky setting. It was trying to load the BootStrap template even though the backend had changed to the default CLEAR template. And since I had deleted the one it was TRYING to use, it was just giving an error message. Which also meant I couldn’t see the page to switch to a different theme.
I tried the page without Bootstrap but with Admin.Tools installed, and it crashed. I reinstalled Bootstrap, went to the main page, and this time it worked no problem. I switched the theme to CLEAR, went back to theme management, deactivated Bootstrap, and deleted it. Went back to the main page, it still worked no problem.
If Flop25 hadn’t mentioned the caching issue i.e. it was looking for something old, not something that was now missing / conflicted / corrupted, I never would have though of it. I just needed to reinstall the missing theme, switch the semi-sticky option in Admin.Tools to something else, and then it was all good.
Piwigo problem with Video.JS
My second problem was a bit more elusive. I said I had video working previously, now it wasn’t. I wondered if perhaps my host had told me I could use video but then their internal systems spotted it and shut it down. Maybe I really couldn’t use video after all and they had changed the configuration. But I tried it in WordPress and it still worked. It just wasn’t working in Piwigo. But I had already solved the theme problem, and so it wasn’t that. Weird.
Basically, here’s the error message I was receiving:
Mediainfo error reading file.
Is MediaInfo install? Is MediaInfo in path?
Is the video accessible & readable, Try to run the command manually.
I read through a bunch of stuff online, and it seemed like somehow Piwigo couldn’t see MediaInfo anymore (a server tool that reads the info on the video file). But it had worked previously, so WTF? I hadn’t changed ANYTHING that would affect that, just themes. And while I thought the theme had corrupted something, it actually hadn’t. It was just a sticky cache.
I didn’t know what the exact problem was, but in the meantime, I could work around it. I was thinking I might try Flop25’s partial reinstallation at some point, so I went onward in my testing to try all the available themes. There are 47 in total available, and while I wasn’t hopeful for any of the dark ones (I prefer lighter backgrounds), some of them have a lighter option hidden in them. So I was working my way through them, one by one.
Basically this means that I would load the new theme, look at the main page, an album page, and a photo page, and see what everything looked like for layout and colours, menu links, etc. I was about 75% of the way through, and something weird happened. I went to the photo page that had the one video on it, and it loaded. No problem at all. It was suddenly working again. But I hadn’t changed anything except the themes.
So of course I initially thought it must be a theme issue. And I had found one that worked. Cool!
So I tried another that was in my “likely for consideration” file that I had already tried, and the video worked in it too. Wait. It didn’t work a minute ago in there, and now it does. That’s NOT a theme issue, but theme is the only thing I changed, wasn’t it? Well, not exactly.
Because when I was on the pages with individual photos, and checking layouts, I had toggled the “INFO” button. For photos, it shows you EXIF data about your photo. I’m not entirely sure I want that data always showing, but having an option is good. Except when I had it toggled ON and I went to the video, the page crashed. When I toggled it OFF, and I went to the video, it worked.
Son of a biscuit.
Apparently I need to learn how to read better. The error message was literally telling me that it couldn’t read the MEDIAINFO — not the media itself, but the info about the media. Basically its metadata. But everyone online was talking about it being unable to read the file when it got that error OR that the MediaInfo app wasn’t loading. But that’s not accurate. It can find and read the file, it just can’t parse the metadata for some reason.
Which made me think, okay, maybe the reason is irrelevant, all I have to do is choose between EXIF for all and no video, or no EXIF but my video would work. Unless…wait a second…didn’t I see a second plugin for EXIF data, maybe it can help. No, that’s to GET the data. I need to block it.
Oh look. In the VIDEO.JS config page, there is an option that says:
METADATA
Show file metadata : Yes No (METADATA_DESC)
I had it set to YES. Maybe that was the default, maybe I set it there because I thought it would be useful. But I turned it off, and now, it doesn’t matter what the page toggle says or not. The page doesn’t try to read the media info / meta data, so it doesn’t throw an error message, and it doesn’t crash. The video files are working again. Yay! And the photos can still have ExIf info if I want.
Which means after some slight testing of my plugins and setups, I’m ready to find a working Piwigo theme. Onward, digital soldier!
