How can I relink them to the current location?
This won't fix your galleries but it should re-link the thumbnail records to the image files.
- Make a backup of your database if you don't already have one.
- Launch TP10
- Make sure that Options | Preferences | Thumbnails | "Auto Remove Orphans" is OFF
- Make sure that Options | Preferences | Thumbnails | "Make Thumbnails Automatically" is OFF
- In the tree panel, open the current location of the image files. There should be no thumbnails (if there are, use Shift-Del to remove the thumbnails while leaving the image files themselves in place)
- In the tree panel, find the greyed-out folder that holds the old thumbnails (not the gallery - the folder!) and open it.
- Now drag-and-drop each folder that holds old thumbnails to the corresponding folder at the new location of the files. - This should re-establish the broken links between the thumbnail records in the database and the matching files.
As for the old galleries, there's no easy way to reestablish those. If it's important, I'd go back to TP7 and open the .td4 file and assign a unique keyword to the files in each gallery. Then convert the database, search for each keyword in TP10 and put the found files in a new gallery.
To be even more specific, how can I change the path on the files? All the files are linked to a CDROM that is no longer available but I have the same file structure and files to the folder I need on a network server.
OK, so here is an alternative approach. If you're a bit of a hacker, I'd recommend getting the free MDB Viewer Plus tool from
http://www.alexnolan.net/software/mdb_viewer_plus.htm (or use MS Access if you happen to have that. If you use the default database type in ThumbsPlus, it will be called *.tpdb8, but it's actually an MDB file)). Start a new database in TP10 and create a single thumbnail: that of one of the old image files at its new location. Open the database in MDB Viewer Plus and compare the field values in the PATH table to those for the old thumbnail. Hopefully you can edit the old thumbnail records to make them point to this new location. I'm not promising that this will work or that there won't be adverse effects, and there may be other fields (in the VOLUME table?) that need to be edited or added. Again, do keep a backup of any important databases.
In case this ever gets moved again, how do I change the folder and file path to be relative instead of absolute? The database files will always be kept at the root of the photo folders.
Use ThumbsPlus to do the moving..!!
If that's impossible/out of your hands, and your image files are moved from one local hard drive to another (with their folder structure remaining intact), then here's a simple fix:
- Exit TP
- Open Explorer or your file manager of choice
- Change the volume label of the new drive to that of the old drive (exactly)
- Launch TP. It uses the volume label (not the drive letter) to identify drives, and so, it should now see the files again.
- In TP, change the volume label back to what it was (if so desired).
If this happens with a network drive, the solution becomes more complicated because in that case, the server name is also used as part of the thumbnail/file matching process. It's usually easiest to just edit the relevant field (I think 'netname' in the 'Volume' table) in the database using MDB Viewer or MS Access.
Show Posts
