Chapter 3 is an interesting chapter on Wisconsin Rapids. The town profile is basically that of an old mill town, with a huge philanthropy base from two key families in town who owned the mills in days gone by, and a mostly summer tourism influx. Other than that, it is has a strong aging population and huge summer crowd, with upwards of 20% seniors in the general population.
The big box in question is again a former Walmart, and as with the examples that belied my original expectation of “out of business” big box stores, this is another one where the initial store was successful and eventually moved to a bigger store in other location, leaving the previous one sitting empty. What made this a bit unique in my view though is that the Walmart is relatively “downtown”.
So here’s the basic skinny…Walmart left, and a shell remained. It had a leaky roof, but the rest of the place was structurally sound. A community group was trying to build a seniors centre where three large service providers could co-locate to serve mostly shared clientele across their base. Yet their first instinct was not to occupy the old box space but to build something entirely new. When they couldn’t secure funding for that, they looked at the Walmart space and found ways to reconfigure it to attract funding.
For example, one of the regional groups was more likely to fund them if they were revitalizing an existing space than building new. Public support would be key to all the funding options, and a huge effort was made by media, government, advocacy groups to get everyone on board. Many were opposed to it being “Walmart-quality” and the optics, but once the designs were in place, it seemed viable. In the end, they had pretty creative financing.
Reading the chapter, it is obvious that “something” was going to happen, the question really was “where”. In the end, the Walmart space was way more costly than building new, but the redevelopment aspects attracted different sources of money. But for me, I found three really interesting factors to be:
a. The importance of the aesthetic redesign so people would stop seeing it as the Walmart space;
b. The renting out of space to non-retail renters which allow the three core service providers to basically generate some income to cover usage costs for other parts of the building (i.e. sustainability); and,
c. The creative idea to tear down PART of the building so that the remaining space would all be used, and there wouldn’t be the appearance of “empty unused space” as the facility was actually bigger than they needed.
This example comes closest to what I hoped for in the initial premise of the book — examples where an existing SPACE gets repurposed and flourishes (as opposed to simply repurposing land or putting in a different retailer).
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.
Chapter 2 takes us to a suburb of Austin that grew into its own as the town of Round Rock. This is closer to the type of “re-use” I was interested in when I started reading the book — a building that was previously a Walmart and was / is now being used as something else.
The really interesting part of this chapter is the interplay with Walmart as the continued owners of the land. They bought the land initially, built their store, operated it for awhile, and it was successful. Dell located its HQ in the area, things started to rocket in the local economy, and they decided to build a super-centre across the road, leaving the old location empty. While there were lots of suitors looking to buy and use the land, Walmart was happy to let it sit empty unless the deal included a lot of restrictions on what could be put there for the future — basically eliminating any business that would compete with Walmart.
Then came a proposal to use it as an indoor race track for super go-karts / low-power racing cars. Ten cars at a time, racing around the indoor tracks, with racing league nights, conference rooms (mainly for Dell to rent out for corporate events), and early adoption of wifi in the lobbies. With no competition against Walmart, the deal was done, with a local developer buying it and the race track leasing it for awhile.
Initially, the deal looked awesome, mainly because the race track people were looking for a large empty warehouse structure to race around in. They didn’t care about the location; although it was great, they mainly cared about the structure. However, that same “deal” had a built-in ticking bomb…eventually, when some of the lease restrictions eased, it was more profitable for the landlord to lease to companies who wanted the location bad enough to pay a premium for being there. And so it eventually out-stripped the race track’s revenue stream, and they rented to a gym, tanning salon, barbershop, smoothie store, and a health food place.
Whether it was Walmart’s “holding out” for the right initial deal, or the subsequent developer “holding out” for the right leasee, or even later selling it to the right buyer for more than 3x the original purchase price, all of the owners used it as a “land bank” — they bought it up and held on to it, thus controlling future developments while others built up around it.
What I also found interesting was that the racetrack found ways to even use the parking lot — for motorcycle courses and mini-races, antique car shows, carnivals, etc. … almost none of it particularly “revenue generating” so much as just straight marketing and cross-promotion.
I found this chapter had a lot of great variables that raise some interesting questions. Do most of the “land banks” generate future profits? Does it require the first Walmart to still be nearby to draw extra infrastructure? Was it just because the whole area continued to boom? Lots of big box stores like K-Marts and Zellers in Canada did not “accrue” interest acting as land banks, as the areas were essentially dying. They sometimes find alternate users, but usually at a far cheaper rate than the land bank would suggest. Equally, it raises the question of timeframe for re-use…if you looked at this one in the early days, it looks like a giant success story. Five to ten years later, the racetrack is gone, the developer got its profits, and the location seems to have been broken up some, although the gym is still there.
Again, though, like the predecessor, it is just “different retail” in a retail space. While the raceway was interesting, maybe even iconic, the ultimate reality is simple retail use. Out with one vendor, in with another.
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!
