Sorry - this is a bit complex to explain:

I have recently migrated from a much older jAlbum & Turtle. I have "offer download as zip for originals" checked.

My normal operation is to upload a project containing a months updates some time in advance, with the folders "hidden". Then when I want to publish them I rebuild it with the folders "not-hidden" - so the build & upload for publication only takes a few seconds. This is handy as I can do my monthly upload from home at a convenient time, and the publication at the right time, which may be when I am travelling and may not have a good internet connection. I publish parts of the project twice a week.

If you build a folder "hidden" it doesn't create the zip. With the old jAlbum/Turtle I had a workaround. I would build the project with the folders "not-hidden", which created the zip files. Then I would build it with them "hidden", which took a few seconds, hid the folders, but didn't touch the zips. I would upload, and then when it came time to do the publication, I would "un-hide" the appropriate folders, and a quick build & upload would do the job.

Unfortunately with the current jAlbum/Tiger this doesn't work. The first "not-hidden" build creates the zip. The "hidden" build doesn't touch it, and it gets uploaded. The problem is that rebuilding the folder "not-hidden" for publication re-creates the zip, and therefore due to the timestamp change, it uploads it again.

I can think of ugly workarounds, like making copies of the first zip file created for each folder, and after each build manually copying that back over the newly-recreated zip. This would be a pain and error prone as my monthly projects have around 20 folders.

Is anyone else doing this? Do you have a better workaround? Or is there a setting in jAlbum that I haven't spotted that will fix it?

Thanks, that could be a possibility. The issue would be that I'm not publishing the entire project. Typically the project will have about 20 folders, and I publish 2 or 3 at a time. I'll see if I can work out something

edit>>>

OK. Checking on what happens when I "un-hide" a folder and rebuild, the only files that matter that change in the "album" directory are index.html, data1.json, deep-data.json & tree.json.

I can try building with each extra set of folders unhidden, starting from all hidden, ending with all visible. After each build I will put those files in a subdirectory "update-1", "update-2" etc. I can upload the whole lot at once. Then my publication process will be to move the next set of files from "update-xxx" to the album directory.

Not particularly friendly, but it will work

I'll leave the question not-answered for now, in case someone comes up with a better idea.

Edited by: AndrewDD on 23-Feb-2021 22:10