HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

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parkerc
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HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by parkerc »

Hi

Having spent a very long time getting all my photos imported, sorted in order, updates missing geo- locations, applying some tags, and probably the most time using the AI to identify and tag people in every picture. What protection do I have ?

How can I be sure all my hard work is not lost ?

Is everything written into the image file by default, or is it stored separately which means it’ll be lost if I was to move away from QNAP ?

Looking at the backup/restore options under ‘settings’ in both Photo Station and QuMagic it looks like they provides some capabilities, yet there is a disclaimer that tags applied by QuMagic Core (which I assume are the people ones) are not covered ?
Model Name : QNAP TS-253be (16GB) & TS-453D (16GB)
Firmware Version:: QTS Latest
OS Version : Apple iOS (iPad/Safari Browser)
Number & Type of HDDs : 2 x 3TB WD Reds, Raid 1 & 4 x 4TB WD Reds, Raid 5
Website (When I have time) : http://www.nodecentral.co.uk
Dic3man
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by Dic3man »

As of now no protection (i.e no backup possibilities) from what I have read, so pray to the flying spaghetti monster that you dont have to redo all your hardwork (especially the faces in qumagie (i have redone it once and have read some posts from people that have had to redo it several times).
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parkerc
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by parkerc »

Thanks

I’ve logged a call with QNAP to see if this issue is on their radar - If it’s not, then it’s a big oversight ..
Model Name : QNAP TS-253be (16GB) & TS-453D (16GB)
Firmware Version:: QTS Latest
OS Version : Apple iOS (iPad/Safari Browser)
Number & Type of HDDs : 2 x 3TB WD Reds, Raid 1 & 4 x 4TB WD Reds, Raid 5
Website (When I have time) : http://www.nodecentral.co.uk
valiant
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by valiant »

I opened a QNAP issue as well, and this feature doesn't exist. Good luck with that parkerc, I just lost all tagged faces and album after the last Multimedia Console update, something absolutely unacceptable by a company like QNap!
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parkerc
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by parkerc »

Absolutely ! And for a company like QNAP - that promotes themselves as one of the best choices for your back ups , providing their own applications without a comprehensive backup facility is an amazing oversight. So much so I’ve logged it as a feature request too - so if you and/or others log a call too - that can only help matters.
Model Name : QNAP TS-253be (16GB) & TS-453D (16GB)
Firmware Version:: QTS Latest
OS Version : Apple iOS (iPad/Safari Browser)
Number & Type of HDDs : 2 x 3TB WD Reds, Raid 1 & 4 x 4TB WD Reds, Raid 5
Website (When I have time) : http://www.nodecentral.co.uk
pencilpusher
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by pencilpusher »

I too am extremely frustrated with MutiMedia Console, PhotoStation, and QuMagie. Like others I've spent days tagging faces. I have about 13,000 photos. A few months (July-ish 2019) ago I tagged most faces and then lost all my work through some (I think Multimedia Console) update. I don't really know what caused the issue but support had to uninstall and reinstall the MultiMedia Console. It was so screwed up, they had to use console commands to delete it. Of course after this I had to re-index. So then in October I spent the next few months redoing all my work... again. Between August through December QNAP updated MultiMedia Console, PhotoStation, and QuMagie. I updated as they came out. Finally finished all my re-tagging at end of December. Everything seemed to work although can't say for sure because I wasn't doing thorough testing. All I was looking for was whether I lost all my tags in PhotoStation and QuMagie. Today I'm running into issues with the MultiMedia Console & PhotoStation (although my issues may have been present in November when Multimedia Console 1.0.9 was released). I can't pinpoint what caused my problems (assume it's one of the MultiMedia console updates; maybe 1.0.9 or 1.1.1 or 1.0.12) but I can say that upon a server reboot I get an error message saying the my MultiMedia Console database is corrupted and can't be repaired. It's basically saying I've got to re-index. I know from past experience that when I re-index, I will loose all my tags. Other issues I've noticed. In PhotoStation, I can't upload a picture. It will display the picture momentarily and then delete it with the message "Unable to upload . The following files extensions are excluded by Media Library. To update allowed extensions, got to Control Panel>Applications>Multimedia Management>Media Folder>Setting". These instructions are faulty. The path, in essence, doesn't exist. After searching for some setting to change, can't find where it's excluding .jpg's. I think this is related to the corrupt library. I'm pretty sure I could upload at the end of December after the 1.0.9 release.

The good news is all the tags I've made still exist in PhotoStation & QuMagie. All "ignored people" still exist. I can manually add new photos via Windows File Explorer to the NAS photo directory. However, PhotoStation & QuMagie don't know they exist; ie. Multimedia Console is not indexing these new photos. Further MultiMedia Console shows no photos have been indexed, no thumbnails generated, & the AI Engines show nothing (they all did at the end of December!!!). I can see the new photos in QNAP File Station though. The good news is PLEX shows the newly added photos along with all my existing photos. So at least I can display them to others.

I don't plan on re-indexing. I'm hoping that QNAP will somehow create a process to "save all my tags". If not, I plan to take screenshots (will be a lot) of all the people I've tagged. This means, as an example, that if 200 photos are associated with a tagged person, I plan to screen shot all of them and do the same for all tagged people. WHY do this? My original tagging required getting others involved to identify who people were at various stages of their life. I could not reproduce this off the top of my head. I will have to have some other method to identify folks so screenshots are the only thing I can think of to do.

To me it is strange that QNAP released MultiMedia Console 1.1.1 on January 21, 2020 AND THEN released MultiMedia Console 1.0.12 on January 22, 2020. Did they screw up their version naming convention because it looks like they are going backwards? OR did they find a MAJOR issue after they released the update, didn't warn customers, and then released 1.0.12 hoping no one would notice?

As a previous poster said, QNAP is using their customers to debug their software. I'm guessing these issues won't be fixed anytime soon. So I will use QNAP only to store photos. PhotoStation, MultiMedia Console, and QuMagie ARE just software products at an ALPHA release stage. PLEX seems to work consistently for displaying all photos in the right directory folder and correctly indexing new photos. I won't re-index to allow me to show others photos of tagged people. This won't include any new photos I've added since December but something is better than nothing at this stage. It delays having to re-tag all 13,000 photos YET AGAIN! Maybe in 2021 they will have hired better software programmers.

I recommend that others DON'T bother using the above apps (MultiMedia Console, PhotoStation, QuMagie) to avoid wasted work UNTIL QNAP releases PRODUCTION QUALITY software. If you can swing it, use PLEX.
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dolbyman
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by dolbyman »

yes..you posted this rant now 3 times.
we get it...and qnap won't read this
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parkerc
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by parkerc »

I get it we‘re ultimately a test group and I can accept some bugs / but what I can’t accept is an inability to protect and back up data we create via QNAP apps.

I also agree QNAP won’t take steps or make plans based on forum posts - which is why everyone has to log official calls - as that is something they will see and if enough are made it will trigger some activity/ improvements
Model Name : QNAP TS-253be (16GB) & TS-453D (16GB)
Firmware Version:: QTS Latest
OS Version : Apple iOS (iPad/Safari Browser)
Number & Type of HDDs : 2 x 3TB WD Reds, Raid 1 & 4 x 4TB WD Reds, Raid 5
Website (When I have time) : http://www.nodecentral.co.uk
pencilpusher
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by pencilpusher »

First, dolbyman...sorry for multiple posts. Thought possibly different groups of people may look at the different threads.

I have sent in my concerns to QNAP support as we all should.

I also want to share what I have been doing to somewhat minimize my rework of future tagging of people. Maybe some will find value, I don't know. Sharing to be helpful. As I shared in my previous post, tagging people took the effort of many people over several months of the 13,000 photos in my case. I likely won't be able to ask for that effort again. Even though I won't be re-indexing anytime soon, I am very concerned that some release from QNAP will force a re-indexing of photos which will then cause the loss of all my tags. So to mitigate at least some of the re-tagging effort, I'm using the software application "Snagit" (there may be other similar tools one can use) to capture all the faces of a person as shown in QuMagie -> Album -> People. Snagit has a "Panorama" feature where one can "manually page" through pages of people's faces creating just 1 screen capture. I have about 400 tagged people. Each folder of people could have anywhere from 1 photo to 700 photos. With this tool, I can have one photo that captures hundred of faces of one person. Later I can expand the capture to view each face in greater detail. This solution doesn't the issue of metadata loss but it will certainly help (in my case) the re-tagging effort. Using this method, it took about four hours to capture the 13,000 tagged people's faces.
boombata
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by boombata »

Hello ,

just to share that in case of power outage with qumagie pointing to an encrypted folder then all indexing will have to be done again.
the encrypted volume does not auto mount after the crash and the index is flushed ;(

ticket sent to qnap 5very reactive), they asked for me to reproduce but i don t want to redo the indexing for the 4th time , i bought a UPS and provided them the procedure to easily reproduce.
seeing the ticket status (closed), i doubt that it will be reproduced ;)

did someone already investigate where is this index saved and if there is a way to archive it manually without qnap tools ?

br
bm
themath78
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by themath78 »

interrested to know where is this index ? is it in a database ?
thanks
Nekdo
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by Nekdo »

This is a very frustrating issue that I reported to Qnap. Out of curiosity I did a little research and here is what I found. Everything is stored in mariadb (mysql). The easiest way to backup / browse it, is to install the server from maridb.org, then copy folder /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.system/data/s01 to C:\Program Files\MariaDB 10.5\data\s01 (in my case) and open it with a client like HeidiSQL, phpMyAdmin... You can see the data is stored in tables like faceTable etc.

Another way to back it up is also to ssh to NAS and run this command: /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump --defaults-file=/usr/local/mysql/my-mariadb.cnf -u root -pqnapqnap s01 > backup_s01.sql

There should be a way to connect to db directly by creating SSH tunnel and connecting to it with
host: 127.0.0.1
user: root
pass: qnapqnap
port: 3310
db: s01

This is what I found about backing it up, but don't know if it would work after restoring.

Resources:
viewtopic.php?t=145022
https://github.com/johnwww/photostation ... y-database
psgnas
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by psgnas »

I'm bumping this thread after a search for a way to backup my work of face tagging my photo collection. I would hate to see it going down the drain after some software update or any other issue with Multimedia or Photo Station.

knowing about some frustrating experiences and reports to Qnap, is there any news in this most needed feature?
psgnas
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by psgnas »

After raising a feature ticket for the Photo Station tag backup, I've received the following reply:

Code: Select all

Hi .....,

Thank you for contacting QNAP.

I have raise a Feature Request to have Photo Station backup function to include people/face tags.
Our product managers will discuss and may consider this request in future release. 

Please note we do not provide the status or timetable for new features.

Kind regards,
Gerry
I just hope this feature can come quickly.
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parkerc
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Re: HELP - Backing up all photo data - tags, location, people etc.

Post by parkerc »

Great news @ psgnas
parkerc wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2020 5:39 am ... I’ve logged it as a feature request too - so if you and/or others log a call too - that can only help matters.
My ‘request’ has been sitting there for almost a year, but the more people log the same issue or request, the more chance we have of getting the matter addressed..
Model Name : QNAP TS-253be (16GB) & TS-453D (16GB)
Firmware Version:: QTS Latest
OS Version : Apple iOS (iPad/Safari Browser)
Number & Type of HDDs : 2 x 3TB WD Reds, Raid 1 & 4 x 4TB WD Reds, Raid 5
Website (When I have time) : http://www.nodecentral.co.uk
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