Omeka Toolkit: Troubleshooting/Help

This guide is a toolkit of resources about Omeka compiled for a series of workshops for Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students, as well as our larger community.

Introduction

In this section, we've listed some web resources, known issues, and common questions. We will add to it as we help Omeka users and compile more information. If you have an issue listed below and the fix doesn't work, please contact us at omekahelp-g@vt.edu and our library Omeka team will do our best to help you. If you have encountered an issue or have a question not on this list, please contact us as well. We're happy to help you troubleshoot!

Omeka Help Resources

Omeka Classic User Manual
Omeka Classic Plugins
This site is useful if you are running a locally hosted Omeka instance and want to incorporate additional plugins.

FAQs/Common Problems

Known Issues

Upload Error with Reclaim Hosting and CSV Import

If your Omeka site is hosted on a Reclaim server and you attempt to upload metadata using the csv import plugin, you will likely get an error message that looks like this: "The configured PHP path (/bin/php) is invalid." (You may not see a specific error unless you toggle to developer mode/error logging. However, there is a fix for this. See: https://omeka.org/classic/docs/Technical/Setting_PHP_Path/ and https://community.reclaimhosting.com/t/working-with-omeka-classic/194. In short, you should go to your Omeka admin site > Settings > General and in the "Image Magick Directory Path," add "/usr/bin."

Using the CSV import template with Excel

If you use our Sheets based template to create a csv file and you are using special characters, you can load your saved csv file directly into Omeka.
If you download the template and open it in Excel AND you are using special characters, those characters will format incorrectly, whether you save the file as csv or csv UTF-8. This can cause the characters to corrupt on upload and display incorrectly OR prevent the file from uploading at all.
The easiest way to avoid this is to use the Sheets based template (make a copy) and export the csv file directly from that. If you do download the template to use offline, we highly recommend you reopen it in Sheets and THEN create the csv file, since Sheets should be able to correct the special character coding and it automatically saves csv as csv UTF-8.

Omeka Help

Are you working on an Omeka project? Do you need help getting started? Stuck on an issue or have a problem you can't resolve? Email us (omekahelp-g@vt.edu) and we will connect you with someone at the University Libraries who will try to help!