I'm interested in hearing how other people go about updating the public formulas in UF. I've only done it twice and both times old images of mine went bad. How do you keep track of problems like that? Going through hundreds of fractals to see if you need to restore a backup doesn't seem efficient.

For all my "good" images I use private copies of UF database formulas. And I save all my images as UPR with formulas included. Thus I have the possibility to move public files and urge the UPR to use the included code. In many cases my images are safe this way.

When you say "private" formulas, do you mean the author has sent you a personal copy of his formula. I didn't know we were able (allowed) to ask. Very often i cannot open images in UF 'cos the formulas are not on the public formula db

Attached Link: http://www.ultrafractal.org/tiki-index.php

There are many formulae public available which are not a part of the public UF dBase. Read the article I wrote about that. Open the webpage; click on Articles in the Menu; Title: UF General Background Info. There you will find a lot of important information. You can make a copy of it and paste it in your word/text editor. All the best. Jos.

"I use private copies of UF database formulas" means exactly what you can read. Too often updates of formulas kill pictures. So with copying the file to a new location and giving it a new name (e.g. ...Publicfile.ucl to ...Privatefile-01.ucl) you do not harm any copyrights.

Thanks for the tip!

Thankyou all

Attached Link: http://formulas.ultrafractal.com/

Quote: "I've only done it twice and both times old images of mine went bad." Do you mean that the new formula was not backwards compatible? In that case leave a comment to the UF list and/or report it to the formula writer. Tell us the formula name and the formula collection and if it is possible send a sample UPR. And did you do the download from the formula in the right way? Open UF>>Options>>Update Public Formulas>>Full formula collection (1st time). After that you can do it weekly (weekly update) or Monthly (monthly update). But you can also take a look what formulae are added as real new formulas or updated to the dBase. Open the webpage and click on: view list of changes. All the best. Jos

I've had this happen to me, too. What I do is, before I update my formulae, I back up all of my upr's from my "wip" folder, my "Formulas" folder and my "Gradients" folder. When an image gets "broken", I just go to the latest cd that it opens correctly with and replace the "broken" formulas in your public formula folder with the version that works. I just spent half an hour figuring this out again - had to go way back to Nov of '03. Luckily, all 9 broken layers used the same formula from the mjd.ufm file. I had to copy the formula from cd and then replace the one on my C drive. It's a pretty old pic that's been sitting around waiting a LONG time for me to figure out if it's worth posting or not. Reckon it's been "broken" for over a year and I just noticed it. And just opening the upr from cd, re-saving it to your C drive and saying "Save formulas" doesn't seem to work because the upr still tries to look in your C drive public formulas. So you have to totally replace the formula file with the older version. Anyhow, I sorta agree with Andreas - it's become evident to me that maybe you update your public formulae at some risk to your earlier work and I would NEVER do it without backing up the previous formula folder first. Probably the best thing to do might be, when a formula writer announces a new set of formulas, just see if you can get them to e-mail them to you separately to avoid any unannounced revisions to others? Good luck! Rick