Hi. I’m having problems sharing bloom projects between computers. I did a backup onto a flash drive, and opened it on my computer, but on my computer now the project with all the books shows up, but the images in the books don’t display correctly. Why is this happening, and what is a better way to share?
Hi Karen, sorry to here you are having troubles with this.
I did a backup onto a flash drive, and opened it on my computer, but on my computer now the project with all the books shows up, but the images in the books don’t display correctly.
I’m not an expert, but I believe that some backup strategies are less reliable than others. So, my first thought would be that some files were not fully copied over to the flash drive. This would account for the images not displaying correctly. Back when I was a user of SIL software on the field, I found the program “ViceVersa PRO” to be a helpful program to ensure a faithful replication of files to an external device. I’m sure there are many other such programs.
If you qualify for Bloom’s locally-funded Enterprise status, the easier way to approach this is to use Bloom’s “Team Collections” feature. This feature, which is still experimental, enables multiple people (or in your case, a single person working on multiple computers), to collaborate on a Bloom collection.
If you want to pursue this option, please let us know.
Hi Karen. We find that a good way to share books is to zip the collection folder. If your book has special characters, you may find that 7zip will work best. By zipping the entire collection folder, you ensure that all necessary files are available to the person you are sharing your book(s) with when they unzip the folder. It is probably best to either close Bloom or at least be in a different collection when you zip the collection that you want to share. Once we zip a collection, we usually modify the filename of the zipped file to include the date it was zipped (we prefer to use YYYY-MM-DD so that it is easy to keep track of the most recent version).