Hello everyone!
I've been hosting Ente on my server for a year or so, and it has been going well. But last month I discovered that some images and video's on both my own and shared albums are blacked out and I cannot click on them directly.
For the ones I could download, I deleted the original ones afterwards and uploaded them again. This did fix the issue, but there are way too many images for this to be done manually, not to mention the ones that error out when downloading. There are also some images that do display correctly on my Android phone and my family's iPhones. Though the latter issue might be explained away by the (lack of) needed codecs on my Fedora system.
I checked my hard drive's health using smartctl. The self test completed with no errors, and the SMART test passed. I also updated the Ente containers but the issue persisted.
There is no agency or anything. I have a cold backups for the volume from two months ago and an a simple plaintext one from last year. So it's luckily not a major issue, but I am a bit worried the issue may reappear after reverting.
Has anyone else had this issue? Or some pointers to where I could be looking?
Cheers!
Before you redo the rest by hand, check whether the broken ones share a format. Black frames that render fine on the phones but not in a desktop browser usually mean the original file is intact and it was the server-side preview that failed to generate, with the phones quietly decoding the original themselves. HEIC and HEVC and 10-bit HDR are the usual suspects, since those lean on libheif and ffmpeg on the server and older builds choke on them.
If that's the cause, re-uploading only "works" because it reruns preview generation, so you're really just triggering a fresh encode. Grep the museum logs around one of the bad files for a decode error, and see whether a rescan or clearing the thumbnail cache regenerates them in place. That would save you doing the whole library one file at a time.