Photoshop CS3 web gallery bugs(?); vanishing metadata, bad sort order

AL
Posted By
art_ludwig
Aug 11, 2008
Views
266
Replies
7
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Closed
Running OS 1.5.4 on 24" Imac, I’m attempting to generate a "horizontal slideshow" from bridge-selected files in Photoshop CS3.

[Sounded like the problem in this post: <http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b5a9fe/2> but on re-reading I’ve decided it’s different so I’m giving it it’s own thread, with more detail…]

Here’s my experience:

1) Description and title show up for a second on the first slide, then revert to just the blank template on that and all subsequent slides (title: [blank] description: [blank]….

Hitting "refresh" produces the descriptive metadata for a tantalizing moment, then it’ s back to the blank template for this and all subsequent slides. It does this both for Safari and Firefox.

You can view this behavior in a slideshow at <http://oasisdesign.net/projects/earthtoilet/>

If it asks for a password, use—
user:earthling
pass: draf1 )

"preserve all metadata" is checked.

I’ve tried all combinations of checking/ unchecking "title, description, filename" for labeling…also, making slideshows with just one or two slides to reduce the chance that it’s a weird character issue of the type some other folks have experienced…

2) additionally, the web gallery is not respecting the manual sort order in Bridge, which is the source of the files. The help files say the slideshow should follow the manual sort order in Bridge.

3) Finally, metadata entered in bridge metadata tab sometimes vanishes, sometimes metadata entered in file info wouldn’t show in the metadata tab.

Thanks for your help!!

Art

BTW, here’s the related issues I found:

<http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b5a9fe/2>
….After some investigation, I found that the descriptions were disappearing only for photos that had a Return / Line Break in the description. If you go back and make sure all of your descriptions are a single line, it works fine….

=Don’t have line breaks, nor "and" nor &…

<http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bff9de1/0>
<http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bd62ec3/0>

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JJ
Jim_Jordan
Aug 11, 2008
The tilde in a filename (baño) seems to be a problem similar to the ‘&’ found to be a problem in the other thread. The Photoshop gallery script turned this text into ‘ba-o’.

Adobe’s gallery scripts/functions are persnickety about characters outside of the basic 26-letter US alphabet. Try simplifying the filenames and titles that you use.
AL
art_ludwig
Aug 11, 2008
Jim,

Thanks for writing.

I just tried making a web gallery from just three simple test images, with names 001.jpg, 002.jpg, and 003.jpg, and meta descriptions and titles along the lines of "abc"–no even slightly weird characters, line breaks, capitals, nothing.

Oh…I also restarted the computer, and ran adobe updater to make sure I had the very latest software.

Same result. Also tried doing it from PS, indicating a folder, so as to circumvent Bridge (see below).

While preparing for the experiment above, I noticed that metadata changes aren’t "sticking" in bridge at all now, either from the metadata tab or file info, even though it gave me "change the metadata? y/n" type dialog. Change the metadata, looks great, click on another image, click back to the first and the changes are gone.

I tried changing metadata in PS instead, this seemed to work, and the changes showed up in Bridge, once the cache was cleared.

All this while, other web gallery layouts, such as "white on black" are apparently working with my files, weird characters and all (though not the dreaded "&"). "Horizontal neutral" seems to work also, but it doesn’t seem to include descriptions, by design. "Table2" and "horizontal simple" also produce web galleries with metadata, but won’t work for my purpose.

In summary, I believe there are a few problems:

1) "Horizontal slideshow" covers over the metadata that it includes, perhaps due to a program glitch

2) Sort order may be off from bridge…

3) Somehow my installation of Bridge has progressively lost it’s ability to make metadata stick, perhaps by interacting with some bug in PS or who knows what.
JJ
John Joslin
Aug 12, 2008
"US alphabet"? 8o

I think you’ll find the Romans had it a bit before the USA ever existed!
JJ
Jim_Jordan
Aug 12, 2008
‘ñ’ is a derivative/modification of the original Roman alphabet. That is why a more specific ‘US alphabet’ was mentioned (it also has a few more characters than the Roman alphabet).

To be specific, one can reference this page of characters < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_ entity_references> that may need to be replaced or escaped in HTML and XML.

Adobe has an apparent bug that is not handling special characters properly. This has appeared in both the gallery creators in Bridge and in Photoshop. I don’t usually work with Adobe gallery creation functions so I can’t offer any more ideas beyond this character issue. If your gallery comes with an XML file, try accessing it directly in a browser to see if there are specific errors to address. Most modern browsers are good at validating XML.
AL
art_ludwig
Aug 12, 2008
OK…here’s the hack I used to get around what I’m now totally convinced are program bugs and shortcomings relative to advertised functionality, for anyone else who has to deal with this, followed by my (suggested fixes to Adobe), for they’re worth…

1) Sort everything the way you want in bridge.

2) Make meta descriptions w/o weird characters (a warning here would be helpful)

3) Use "batch rename," with "copy to another folder" to give the images totally plain vanilla, DOS-style file names (001.jpg, 002.jpg…). This solves most filename issues and the works around web gallery’s failure to recognize bridge sort order in one go. Note that you can irrevocably screw up the names of all your original files if you’re not very careful to COPY at this step.

([a] make the bridge sort work directly, as advertised, por favor. [b] add an error message or warning about file names such as 006-(2).jpg causing malfunction. A compassionate, low-effort short-term patch for Mac users of web gallery, especially since bridge generates that particular sort name itself invisibly and automatically if you move a file with the same name into a folder)

4) Use "white on black" instead of bug-ridden "horizontal slideshow" (horizontal slideshow should be fixed or deleted from the next version…multiple slideshow options would be awesome, as they advance automatically at the max rate the user’s bandwidth allows, a very attractive feature)

5) Restrict all images to the same height so users can click *in the same spot* to advance the 200 images with less carpal tunnel (the advance arrow should *always* be in the same spot, for every web gallery, IMHO)

Web galleries are a fantastic tool for sharing information easily…I hope to see some evolution in those great automatic updates someday…
AL
art_ludwig
Aug 12, 2008
Oh, another idea for Bridge enhancement: the sort order can be such a valuable investment, for various purposes, that it would be great to be able to save it as a file, independent of the cache, which disappears occasionally…
R
Ram
Aug 12, 2008
another idea for Bridge enhancement

That would belong in the Feature Requests section of the Adobe Bridge Macintosh forum upstairs.

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