Orphans and Duplicate Albums Revisited

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Get this information from the PHP diagnostic (in the configuration wizard).
Gallery URL (optional but very useful): http://www.catalina320.com/gallery
Gallery version: 1.5.7
Apache version: 2.0.61
PHP version (don't just say PHP 4, please): php 5.2.3
Graphics Toolkit: imagemagic
Operating system: Linux
Web browser/version (if applicable): any

Hello,

I've read every topic I could find here regarding Duplicate entries and Orphans.

I started my gallery way back at 1.3 or earlier. Most of the albums were created and added to over time, rarely were they relocated via the gallery "move" operation.

It *appears* that there is a bug with moving nested albums around with some combination of "renaming" the albums via the gallery rename album menu option.

Here's what I did:
* I used the very helpful php-deserialize script to get a better understanding of the album.dat and albumdb.dat.
* What I found was that several Child Albums still referred to the Parent Album's OLD name, even after the child album was moved to top level. This resulted in FindOrphans thinking that these albums were orphans even when they appear at the gallery root.
* I tried all the various combinations of moving stuff around, renaming, overwriting directories, etc. that were mentioned in various posts, without real success.
* EMACS to the rescue. I went in and edited the album.dat file for each album that showed that it was an orphan and changed the s:15:"parentAlbumName";s:16:"TheMissingParent"; to s:15:"parentAlbumName";i:0; (where "TheMissingParent" were names of albums that were renamed within gallery at some point.)
* VIOLA! They vanished from the Orphans list and I was able to successfully move them down into some child album properly.

NOTE: I had previously taken great tedious pains to move all the photos in duplicated albums to brand new root albums and then delete the duplicates. To Delete Duplicate Album references, I had to first make a copy of the album. Then delete one instance of it. Then restore the copy and delete the second instance. Otherwise, I'd get a error when viewing the parent album when it was trying to render the album entry the "duplicated" item. These instances were created by the "FindOrphans" process of reattaching.

This has been a big problem since I've been reorganizing some albums (using only Gallery GUI commands) and I don't yet know what circumstances cause this to happen. But I do know for sure that it can be reproduced using Gallery operations from the GUI without touching the file system.

I suspect, but don't know for sure, that if you have nested albums and rename a parent, the chain of events might start.

If anyone has more information to add here, I'm sure lots of G1 people will really appreciate tracking this down and solving it once and for all!

Look forward to working towards a solution. I'm just not sure which code I ought to look at first (and my time is very limited).