New files/folders appeared inside albums folder

[humdrum]

Hi all,

I have just noticed that a new folder and a few files appeared in my Albums folder.

There's a folder called "edit" with an index.php file inside and a file called no_FTP-uploads_into_this_folder!.txt

There's also another index.php file in the albums folder itself.

The date for these files is May 23 2017 and I did not put them there. Is this part of a recent update or should I be worried about a potential hack?

Thanks and sorry in advance if this is a silly question!

[ron4mac]

That all sounds normal. Did you recently update/upgrade?

[humdrum]

I didn't, though maybe there was an automatic update? Thanks for the reply though! I have noticed the number of visitors to my gallery increased around the same time too, a huge increase that's most likely to be bots.. so I was wondering about it.

[Αndré]

The edit folder is used for temporary files (e.g. if you use "Crop and Rotate"). It will be cleaned automatically from time to time, so you don't need to worry about it.

[Leonard Will]

The documentation says

Except for the "albums" directory, upload all of the new files and directories, making sure not to overwrite your anycontent.php file or the albums directory.

but that means that you will have old versions of albums/edit/no_FTP-uploads_into_this_folder!.txt and albums/userpics/no_FTP-uploads_into_this_folder!.txt

As these are simple text files that don't change, it doesn't matter, but versioncheck will report them as out of date, so it's worth uploading the latest copy to keep versioncheck clean.

[Leonard Will]

I presume that it's also advisable to upload the latest versions of index.php in these subfolders of the albums directory.

[Αndré]

Feel free to update those files. It's written in the docs that way, as there are FTP clients that delete an existing folder and all of its content before uploading the new folder, while most clients just merge the content. It's just a precaution that users won't accidentally lose the whole content of the albums folder.

[Αndré]

It's also described in the docs:

In fact, you could upload the albums folder as well - the one that is contained in the package is empty anyway. The recommendation not to upload this folder is only meant as a pre-caution for some users who have "funny" settings for their FTP apps: some exotic FTP applications delete folders existing on the server and then re-create an empty folder on the server-side. This would of course be a disaster for all existing galleries during the upgrade process, as you would lose all your uploaded files in your gallery. However, the number of FTP apps that is set up in that strange way is small and therefore, it won't hurt for most to upload the albums folder as well.