Fixing issues with Gallery 2 Import to Gallery 3

I have used Gallery for over 7 years or so now and really have found it incredibly valuable to have to share pictures with family and friends. I have migrated through many version updates and now that Gallery just released the flashy looking Gallery 3, I wanted to go ahead and move to that. We have a personal image collection of about 12,000 images or so in our gallery that we have been adding to over the many years and knew an upgrade to the new version 3 was going to be a challenge. I moved off version 1 a couple of years ago and was not really happy with version 2 and the various updates so that was another big reason I wanted to get the new GUI tools and look of the Gallery 3 environment.

To upgrade to Gallery 3, you need to really install 3 in a separate directory, create a new database in mysql and get that all squared-away first then enable the Gallery 2 import module and import your existing Gallery 2 setup and albums. This is a departure from previous updates in that you really need to get a clean parellel struture up and running then run the old environment through the import/scrubbing process. Documentation for this is sparse at the moment since Gallery 3 just really was formally released last week or so.

Anyway, so you do that and I what I did was get that all going by creating a mysql db for Gallery 3 data tables and ran the Gallery 3 installer, etc. and enabled the G2 Import, pointed the importer at the old G2 install path and watched as it grinded-away at the import of the 12k or so images. But, after the multiple hour import process was done, it was a mess in that I didn’t have thumbnails of images at the smallest or resized sizes. I checked the Gallery 3 Forum, but not much help yet. So, I thought, let’s just redo the setup and try the import again. I did and was really careful about permissions in the Apache directory where the new Gallery was going to be and everything, but still no dice. I did notice that when I click through down to the full-sized image, it was present – it was just the the small thumbnail and resized thumbnails were hosed (not present).

At the unix-level, going into the new location where G3 wants to put albums – now in (GalleryDirectory)/var BTW, I noticed for whatever reason there were no thumbnails in the album sub-folders. So, went into the Admin area and did all the Maintenance stuff, but no dice either. The generic ‘Fix’ option that goes through the various low-level checks was no help. Also, the ‘Rebuild Images’ came back with zero images for whatever reason.

I was able to get to a solution by kicking-off a rebuild through the Theme Options under the Admin>Appearance menu. If you do that and change your ‘Thumbnail Size’ and ‘Resized Image’ size, it wants to kick-off a total rebuild for out-of-date files. You will get a prompt at the top of the browser window to have the rebuild go. Even if the values are correct, I changed them to a different value, let the rebuild run and then changed them back and let it run again.

After making the Theme Options changes and kicking off the rebuild you have to sit for a while and it grinds but after, you will get your thumbnails and resized images back. This is something to try in case you make the plunge and your Gallery 2 Import to Gallery 3 doesn’t fully take. I am sure later versions will check for this, but for now it is a workaround.