I seem to have run into a potentially destructive problem with downloading and updating stories that have embedded images, and I think it might be a new thing that just started happening. Unfortunately I've just noticed it and I'm going to be rather busy tomorrow so I haven't delved too deeply yet but I'll dump what information I've gathered so far.
An update was made to a story on FimFiction I've been following,
The Enchanted Library. It's a very nicely produced story that has a couple of pieces of artwork at the top of almost every chapter. I told FFF to update it with my usual "Update EPUB Always" setting, and after it had updated I noticed that my copy of the story had lost almost all of its images and showed them as broken links (it went from 51 images to 6). Checking back through a bunch of other recent updates from the past couple of days shows other stories with similar image loss, I can post more examples if desired.
Fortunately I keep backups, so I dug up my un-updated copy:
epub hosted on Mediafire. I can reproduce the problem reliably by putting that file in Calibre and updating it. I'm surprised and worried for two reasons:
- Previously I was pretty sure that "Update EPUB Always" left old chapters and their associated images untouched even when the image links were genuinely broken, and indeed when I update this story the log claims that all FFF did was download 1 new chapter. Why is it going through existing chapters it shouldn't be updating and nuking the older images?
- The image links aren't broken when I visit the source website, so FFF is apparently failing to download images that it was succeeding at previously.
I've got the settings include_images:true and no_image_processing:true in my personal.ini.
Fimfiction did recently switch from http: URLs to https:, and that caused me a bit of grief as FFF was considering all chapters to be "new" when I updated because the old chapter urls no longer matched. I fixed that with a script that went through all my epubs and updated the http: chapter source addresses to https: ones, though, so I don't think this problem is related to that. I did a bunch of recovery work on my epubs when that happened and images seemed to be downloading fine in the immediate aftermath. I think it may be the most recent FFF update that's causing this new behaviour, but I haven't tried rolling back a version yet to confirm that for certain.
Edit: Strange! I just finished re-downloading The Enchanted Library completely from scratch and it got the images correctly. In fact, I got 82 images compared to the old copy's 51. So whatever's going on is specific to updating my old copy. I suppose it's possible I inadvertently broke something when I ran that http/https conversion script on my epubs, though I'm still pretty certain there was a period between then and now when updating stories with images was working correctly. I really wish I had time to dig into this more, I hate dropping a bug report like this when it might be something I messed up locally. Figured it was worth the risk in this case if something's wiping images out of stories on update.