LJ's Crapbook is unworkable (at least for me)

[feng_shui_house]

Today I tried putting links I'd saved to my old Naarmamo albums (the links worked last year) and discovered that all the links took me to the album collection index page. I wasted a lot of time trying different approaches, and finally I gave up and put in a Support Request.

http://www.livejournal.com/support/request/?id=2021342&auth=k7t7



Can't get to my Scrapbook photos.

No matter what album URL I try it all reverts to the scrapbook page showing the lists of albums.

http://entropy-house.livejournal.com

Pasting the URL into the address bar, clicking on the album cover photo, clicking on the album name, clicking on the number of photos- none of it works. I have 2 browsers and neither one could get to the photos. It all just goes back to the same collection index page.

The ONLY way I could get to an album was by uploading a new image to it (and that changed the URL from 'livejournal.com/photo/album' to 'livejournal.com/album'), and even then it only got the thumbnails of the photos and clicking on a thumbnail brought me back to the same collections index page. And trying the changed url (without the 'photo') gave me a Not Found error page.

I tried using Upload a new image to get to an album, and then edit to move a photo from the old album to a new one. The new album showed up on the list, but again, I couldn't get it to open.

I went to the faqs and found a link to the URL 'http://entropy-house.livejournal.com/pics/catalog' but again, that brought me to the same non-functional album index page.

Here's a number of albums I tried.
http://entropy-house.livejournal.com/photo/album/30775

http://entropy-house.livejournal.com/photo/album/30202

http://entropy-house.livejournal.com/photo/album/28299

http://entropy-house.livejournal.com/photo/album/9776

http://entropy-house.livejournal.com/photo/album/6131

http://entropy-house.livejournal.com/photo/album/2266

And here's the URL it goes to when I tried to upload a new image.
http://entropy-house.livejournal.com/album/30775/?page=1

Comments

[capri0mni]

dmn it! Same thing for me!

That's 152 past NaArMaMo pieces inaccessible, not to mention all the other random pics.

[feng_shui_house]

Maybe if a bunch of us try and report it, LJ will fix it. Maybe. GRRRRRR....

[capri0mni]

Maybe. I don't have the energy for that, myself, though.

I've all but given up on LJ, for all practical purposes. I only keep an account there at all so as not to lose contact with those in my f'list who have not switched to DreamWidth.

[feng_shui_house]

Hah, I just commented a second ago that if you had the energy you could report it. :^) We passed in the ether stream.

[feng_shui_house]

It's probably useless to report it- I looked at a few earlier complaints about Crapbook and the answer was 'oh, you have the OLDER site version! You need to change over to the NEW one' which, no. I'd rather just abandon the photos, it's not like I've been looking at them recently.

[watervole]

Ironic. I'm just considering going back to LJ as my main journal as Dreamwidth just lost another partly completed post in spite of offering to retrieve it for me, and there's something wrong with the LJ importer as well.

[capri0mni]

Well, I've been on Dreamwidth since almost as soon as it came out of beta (2010, I think?), lured here by their commitment to make the site more accessible to the disabled (particularly the vision-impaired), which, as I consider myself a Disability Rights activist, is of prime importance to me.

I imported my entire LJ archive when I joined (going back to November 2002 -- which is why I have a hard time remembering when I "switched sides"), and I've had frequent trouble accessing my archive on the LJ side, but have yet to have any trouble finding 14 year old posts via DW.

Also, since I switched, I get at least comments from at least one person on about 80-90% of the entries I post on DW. On the LJ side, I get maybe as many as three replies in a year, so...

Yeah.

All my old LJ f'list have migrated to Facebook, I think, which I wouldn't touch with an anti-bacterial barge pole.

There are still those friends who comment once a year (and I still read their posts on Lj every day, though... and I'd hate to lose contact with them.

[feng_shui_house]

I gave up on LJ because every time I turned around they were removing functionality I needed (subject lines in comments, reducing the comment collapse from 49 comments down to only a handful, etc. etc.) or else adding something I didn't want (annoying layout, Feed instead of Friends List, etc. etc.), and the final straw was the day I discovered the ONLY journal I could read comments in was the LJ News.

I complained and was told there was nothing wrong, I must have messed up & was given a list of things to do. I did everything, took hours, and still it didn't work.

Days later they sent me a cheerful email that they'd fixed it, without ever admitting it had been broken. I figured if they didn't care if I could use the site at all, then I didn't care either.

[feng_shui_house]

I stopped using Crapbook back in 2011 when they first 'overhauled it' and destroyed the folder organization and even lost a few photo entirely, but I didn't have the gumption to copy everything over somewhere else.

[capri0mni]

Yes. Precisely the same with me...

[feng_shui_house]

I just looked at the Support page for Scrapbook, and while I was the first to report it, a few minutes ago someone else did- and they said it had been working as of YESTERDAY, so, great timing, Marian. :^)

http://www.livejournal.com/support/help.bml?cat=scrapbook

So, if you have the energy, you might like to complain too. I noticed a long time ago that if only a few people complain they tell you it's your computer or your browser, or you just must have made a mistake, but if enough people complain then they pass a note on to whatever remains of a technical support division.

[feng_shui_house]

Although I haven't figured out any way to get to the photo albums, I HAVE found a very tedious way to get the individual photos that currently works for me.

Go to this page:

http://www.livejournal.com/update.bml

click on the 'insert photo icon' (it's the tiny box to the right of the person head) choose Your Albums, choose an album, select photos (no more than 20), make sure it's set at Image size(px) Original, click Add to Post, then click Preview Entry, and you can drag the photos to your computer folder/desktop. You don't need to actually post- you can get the images from preview.

If you want to do more (or if you think the album has more than 20 images), close the Preview box, delete the coding on the update page and repeat the previous steps. This time it will let you scroll past the first 20 images and you can select the next 20. And so on if there are more images, each time you can go a little further until you've got to the end of the album.

I doubt you want to do this, unless maybe there's an album with something really special to you, but I thought I'd share the possibility.

There are now 4 requests for help for the same problem, so it definitely isn't just you and me.

[capri0mni]

Thanks! I'll try that when I have energy and time (the pictures I want are buried way deeper than 20 images in).

[feng_shui_house]

LJ just emailed me to say it was fixed. I haven't tried it yet. I'm thinking I'm going to save everything to my 'puter, so I can have the pics sorted properly.

I hated when they lost the 'nesting'... I had SO many pics in folders of species of birds nested in a bird folder, and even more butterflies. Now I have to open a zillion folders which each contain only a few pics.

[capri0mni]

Thanks for letting me know.

Yeah. The way they changed the scrapbook is one reason I left in the first place (that, and my journal getting flooded with Russian porn 'bots, and Facebook/twitter cross posting, which totally sabotages privacy settings and friends locking, and... and ... and...)

[feng_shui_house]

There were SO many many reasons to leave, I can't even list all the ones I recall. LJ became an environment of incompetence, greed, and hostility towards the users.

Currently it seems to be mostly apathetic, which is actually an improvement, sad to say.

[manna]

Okay, this is suuuuuuper weird.

When I followed your links, I got to the broken index page and couldn't open any of the albums.

BUT! When I went to your user profile page and clicked on the 'photos' link on the right (under statistics), it took me to what looked like the same page, only now everything works. I can open the albums, see the images.

EVEN WEIRDER, if I now click on the links you have in this post, even though they didn't work the first time I tried, now they do. They go right to the albums and I can open pictures.

I have no idea how that even happens, since the links are identical. Something wacky with cookies? LJ happened to fix it in the couple of minutes I was clicking links? No clue at all.

[feng_shui_house]

They just sent me an email saying they'd fixed it, so maybe the change took effect right when you were testing it.

Yay. I'm astonished that it got corrected so fast.