Umbraco Desktop Media Uploader (DMU) Invalid Login Error

The Problem

So your website is built on an older version of the Umbraco CMS. You find, though, that managing your media is a bit cumbersome, especially when you have a large number of files to manage. So you ask your Web developer if there is a better solution than the built-in Media manager. Thankfully, your developer informs you that there indeed is a much better option! There is this wonderful tool that allows you to upload and organize your site’s images much more efficiently than the built-in Media manager, called the Desktop Media Uploader (or DMU, for short).

Your developer explains how it works, and everything seems like a dream. In fact, it’s been right in front of you on the Media manager landing page the whole time, but you didn’t know what it was, or maybe you completely overlooked it. So you immediately go to install and start using the desktop app. After a few minor hurdles, like getting your version of Adobe Air up-to-date (or installing it for the first time if it wasn’t already), you get the DMU installed.

Then you fill in the login credential, click the Sign In button. . .and everything comes to a screeching halt!

“Invalid login.”

No big deal. You must have entered the password incorrectly. So you reenter it.

“Invalid login.” Again.

Hmmm…OK, I’ll copy/paste the password.

“Invalid login.” Still.

Hmmm…maybe the URL isn’t correct.

You get the picture. You try every possible variant of URLs, usernames, passwords and anything else you can think of to get this panacea of a tool working. And nothing works. Now you go to your developer and ask for support.

The Solution

Well, I’m that developer; and although I see several posts about this problem on the Net, I don’t see any good solutions for it. Though I cannot guarantee that the solution we found will solve everyone’s problems with the Umbraco Desktop Media Uploader, I can say that this solution was effective in getting the DMU to work properly on two Windows 7 Pro PCs and two Windows 8.1 Pro PCs.

And it is an incredibly simple fix.

Before tearing out your hair or bashing yourself to a pulp in your keyboard, just do this.

1. Uninstall the Desktop Media Uploader from your PC.
2. Go to the Desktop Media Uploader page.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page where you’ll see a tabbed box.
4. Click on the “Archived Files” tab.
5. Find version 2.0.1 of the “Package” (i.e., “Desktop_Media_Uploader_2.0.1.zip”).
6. Click on that and download it.
7. Install that on your PC.
8. Open the program, fill in the URL, Username, and Password and Sign In.

If that version of the DMU doesn’t work, run through these steps again, next downloading version 2.0.2, then 2.0.3, etc., until you find the one that works for you. Most likely the first version will work (2.0.1), but that may depend on your Umbraco installation.

This may seem overly simplistic, but I’ve read forum posts that run through all kinds of hoops to try to solve this problem (most of them being a complete waste of time) that are much more difficult and time consuming than this solution is.

Hopefully this post helps somebody out there save a bunch of time and effort so you can spend that time doing productive things…like actually using the DMU for what it’s built to do!