Photos Not Showing Up

[stressball]

I maintain a Coppermine install for my company. Today (yesterday it was just fine) all of the photos are gone. It still says that there's 9563 files in 219 albums and 34 categories, but when I click on an album, none of the images show up.

Let me clarify: it still lists each image out, but the picture itself is gone. Where the picture should be is just a link to that picture. I have taken a screenshot: http://www.sdegames.com/images/coppermine.png. In this screenshot I am using Firefox. In IE6 it shows the outline of an image with the typical red X as it shows when it can't find an image.

Has this ever happened before? What do I need to do?

[edit Abbas]
Attached the hotlinked screenshot.
[/edit]

[Nibbler]

Possibilities:

Files are missing/deleted from the disk.
Files have incorrect permissions
Hotlink protection has been added incorrectly.
You updated with fantastico.

Post a link to the gallery for more details.

[stressball]

unfortunately this gallery is maintained in our intranet, so it's only visible inside our company's network. Otherwise, I would have posted the link instead of a screenshot. Sorry.

I'll look into these suggestions and post back if nothing helped.

[Joachim Müller]

I'll look into these suggestions and post back if nothing helped.

Please post as well if Nibbler's suggestions actually did help. Always resolve your threads for the benefit of others with similar issues.

[Sami]

Another possibility would be wrong albums directory name under Configuration

you can compare your Albums folder's name here

Config=>Files and thumbnails advanced settings=>The album directory
VS
{gallery-root}\albums (this is a default name for albums directory)

[stressball]

Alright, so after alot of grief I went and interviewed the girl who is actually doing the picture uploading. Apparently she decided to delete some folders in FTP to clean it up a bit. So, the files were physically deleted. I guess she thought it was alright because the photos had been "uploaded" to Coppermine through the GUI, so (according to her line of thinking at the time) who needs these folders in FTP anymore?

Apparently she didn't grasp the fact that Coppermine just uses the database to point to the real photo on disk and I didn't tell her this. Perhaps future versions of Coppermine could make users painfully aware of this? Because, frankly, I didn't even think this could ever be a problem and Joe User doesn't know anything about databases or how Coppermine is set up.

[Nibbler]

Joe User should read the manual. You can restore your gallery from a backup. If you don't make backups then you'll need to add the files again.

[Joachim Müller]

Joe user doesn't have FTP access. With FTP access, you can do anything. There's no way for us as developers to stop users with FTP access to run havoc and deleted stuff that they're not suppossed to delete. In fact you should only grant FTP access to people who actually know their way around. Make sure that they have read the manual (as Nibbler pointed out). This entire issue is a PEBKAC problem. Marking thread as "solved".