Joomla 5 – Images Disappear or Duplicate After Saving Gallery (After Import)

Hi everyone,

I’m currently experiencing serious issues with Balbooa Gallery on a Joomla 5 development site and I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Environment

Joomla 5 (latest version)
Balbooa Gallery (latest version)
Development site
Galleries imported from an older live Joomla site
All image files are correctly located on the server

The Problem

The galleries import successfully and initially appear fine.

However, once I start editing and saving them, very strange behaviour begins.

Issue 1: Images Disappear After Saving

If I:
Open a gallery
Click Save (even without major changes)
All images disappear from the gallery.

Important:

The physical image files are still present on the server.
Only the gallery entries vanish.

Issue 2: Images Duplicate After Saving

In other galleries, the opposite happens:
When I click Save, all images duplicate.
Each additional save creates another full duplicate set.
After a few saves, the gallery becomes filled with repeated copies of the same images.
I then have to manually remove duplicates every time.

This makes the component effectively unusable.

Troubleshooting Already Done

Completely uninstalled Balbooa Gallery from Joomla 5
Reinstalled it fresh
Re-imported galleries
Same issue immediately reappears after saving

Important Context

This also happened previously when upgrading this same site to Joomla 4. At that time, saving a gallery caused all images to disappear.

So this may not be isolated to Joomla 5.

Questions

Is this a known issue with imported galleries?
Could this be a database structure issue from the older version?
Is there a specific table or JSON field I should inspect?

Has anyone experienced similar duplication or disappearing images after saving?

At the moment the component isn’t stable enough to continue development, so any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any help.