Hi,
I'm trying to fix an old MediaWiki installation, where a few hundred images are located at ./images; they are registered at Special:Files, but the images itself are missing. The paths do not point to ./images/{image.ext}, but to something like ./images/1/15/{image.ext}. I moved a few images manually to the reported locations, which seems to work fine, but I'd like to avoid wasting several hours to create missing subdirectories etc.
I assume, when the Wiki was started, $wgHashedUploadDirectory was set initially to "false" and later changed to "true"; as I understand, there is no maintenance script to fix this. So I tried to utilize ./maintenance/importImages.php which should do the trick, I thought.
However, the script is smarter than me and checks for the existence of the files; of course, this check results in "...could not be imported; a file with this name exists in the wiki". As far as I can see, there is no switch to override this check. In the script's code, I found a routine starting with "# Check existence", which I tried to comment out; this resulted in breaking the script since I don't speak PHP.
If this is the right approach, could someone tell me, which lines I have to comment out in importImages.php or maybe even provide a quick Patch? If, however, this is complicated, don't bother, then I'll waste a few hours for manual fixing this.
Thanks & regards, -asb