New HTML5 uploader hotness

Baldy

EDIT, Nov 5, 2010: This uploader is now live and out of Beta: Release Notes.


If you use the Simple Uploader to upload in a browser window, we hope you'll think the new HTML5 version is simpler, lighter, and cooler.

It comes up as an overlay to a gallery without asking scary
things like Java does:



To give it a test drive, you'll need Chrome or Firefox

and

the simple uploader has to already be your default uploader (the one you used last).

Then click this link:http://www.smugmug.com/hack/enable.mg?feature=html5Uploader
You should get a confirm message.

Users with custom domains may have to use this link:

http://www.customdomain.com/hack/enable.mg?feature=html5Uploader

Then, navigate to a gallery and click the upload button.

To opt-out, click the link you used to opt in.

Let us know how it goes!

hoffmcs

I seem to still be getting the Java uploader. I have tried Uploading to a new album and from an existing album. I have enabled and disabled a couple of times, but still no luck. I am looking forward to all the HTML5 goodness.

Andy

hoffmcs wrote: »

I seem to still be getting the Java uploader. I have tried Uploading to a new album and from an existing album. I have enabled and disabled a couple of times, but still no luck. I am looking forward to all the HTML5 goodness.

What browser are you using, and what version of that browser?

hoffmcs

Chrome Dev Channel - 6.0.447.0 dev

hoffmcs

Actually, I got this to work. I guess there are a lot of entry points into the upload window.

hoffmcs

As the release notes state, you have to open the Album you want to upload to and select To this Gallery from the upload menu.

Erick L

I'm getting errors and there's no link to the gallery that can be right-clicked anymore.

Andy

Erick L wrote: »

I'm getting errors and there's no link to the gallery that can be right-clicked anymore.

Erick: 1) what errors? 2) what browser? Thanks.

Jeremy Hall

Me Likey
Gave it a whirl using Chrome 5.0.375.86 on a Mac. Worked great. I like how it stays right on the page, is quick, and gets around the drag-and-drop issues I was having with the Java uploader.

Usability suggestion: I'd like it to queue up my photos I drop on it until I click an "upload" button (like the Simple Uploader does). Perhaps it's the control freak in me, but I like to create my list of uploads, review, then upload. Also, creating a list helps me if I am pulling photos from various places into the one gallery. Perhaps some feedback to consider.

Baldy

Jeremy Hall wrote: »

Usability suggestion: I'd like it to queue up my photos I drop on it until I click an "upload" button (like the Simple Uploader does). Perhaps it's the control freak in me, but I like to create my list of uploads, review, then upload. Also, creating a list helps me if I am pulling photos from various places into the one gallery. Perhaps some feedback to consider.

Oh, hahaha, we did a bunch of user tests on the old one and one of the big complaints is they had to click the upload button to get it going. Hmmm, wonder how we're gonna solve this.

Jeremy Hall

Preference

Baldy wrote: »

Oh, hahaha, we did a bunch of user tests on the old one and one of the big complaints is they had to click the upload button to get it going. Hmmm, wonder how we're gonna solve this.

That's funny - it's all subjective I guess. We all have opinions...right? I conform to the tools I like, in fact I use MacDaddy more than anything these days but I do like the web upload option for quick, smaller batches. Perhaps in this case it's a preference checkbox for "start upload immediately" or something similar.

jfriend

Baldy wrote: »

Oh, hahaha, we did a bunch of user tests on the old one and one of the big complaints is they had to click the upload button to get it going. Hmmm, wonder how we're gonna solve this.

My usage model is to queue up a bunch of photos to get it ready to go, but then not start it until we go to bed (or until we head out of the house for awhile) so it doesn't interfere with normal internet usage for the house.

If you had a teenager on xbox live, you'd understand how uploading photos can cause serious lag on an interactive game so household harmony benefits from a little control over when exactly I do my uploads.

jfriend

I added some photos to a gallery with the new uploader.

• Uploads worked, had no problem in Firefox
• Upload speed seemed slow to me, but I didn't run any metrics to compare
• The uploader correctly identified (before upload) a pano image that was too large
• The progress that shows nothing more than a spinner is a little disconcerting. I have no way of knowing whether it really is proceeding or not. I'd much rather see some sort of thermometer that shows actual progress. Too many apps die or stall, but the spinner keeps spinning that one can't trust a spinner. But, a moving progress bar is more likely a sign of real progress and it's also an indication of how fast it's going and when it's likely to be done.
• As I said earlier, I'd rather have a manual start button than auto start as soon as I drag something in. I like to set up the upload, verify that I have everything I want (and nothing more) and then choose when to start the upload
• I didn't have any upload errors or network glitches so I don't know how well it handles those conditions (per my comments from yesterday)
• If I had hundreds of images I was uploading, it would take some time to scan the entire list and see which images didn't succeed. Other uploaders just keep the problem images in the queue so you can easily see what didn't work in one glance without having to look through the entire list.

Malte

I don't think I'd miss the thermometer on every file if I could have a time remaining ticker for the entire queue. Let's make the spinner trustworthy instead.

The upload button would be a control thing for me, I don't think I'd miss it.

The "Return to gallery" button implies, since this is an overlay and not a separate page, that I could click that button and have the upload continue in the background. Maybe that's just me. Would be cool if it worked that way, and you'd be able to toggle the queue overlay in gallery settings or some other way.

Malte

timk519

Baldy wrote: »

Oh, hahaha, we did a bunch of user tests on the old one and one of the big complaints is they had to click the upload button to get it going. Hmmm, wonder how we're gonna solve this.

Add a toggle button "upload now/wait until I tell you".

CraigK

Thanks!

jezterr

progress bars were always nice to see, along with a bit rate, since i'm with comcast and it fluctuates and sometimes cuts out. oh, and a (# uploaded)/(# in queue) was also cool to see in addition to the progress bar.

also, you can't call up the html5 uploader from an empty gallery, which is the fastest uploader right now. especially considering the java uploader seems to currently be broken.

jfriend

Feedback on the latest version of the HTML uploader (and yes, this time I'm actually using the HTML uploader, not the simple uploader):

1. There is no way to initially pause the uploads. Why not justmake the Pause Uploads button active before dropping the first file in? I like to queue up a large upload, make sure I have everything and then only start the actual upload later when nobody else is using the internet in the house. You don't make it easy to do that.
2. If I miss the drop target by 1/4", the image I'm dropping loads in the browser window and the entire upload window is gone and there is no way to get my state back at all. Everything I was queuing up to upload is gone forever. This should not be. You should protect the state of everything in that window better than this. In fact, this happens even if I just miss the dark gray area in the middle of the window and still hit the actual HTML uploader window. It also happens if I miss the HTML uploader window entirely and hit the surrounding browser window.
3. While the uploads are going, I like to resize that active browser window to get it out of the way, but when I resize it, the HTML uploader portion doesn't recenter itself so there is no way to resize the browser window to just it's size and still see it. It should recenter itself.
4. When new images are successfully uploaded, they do not show in the image of the gallery that is partially grayed out behind the upload window.
5. When I'm dropping more images into the window than will show without scrolling, you should scroll to the bottom of the list so I can confirm that the drop worked. As it is, I get no good feedback that dropping a new image into the list actually did anything.
6. If I have the upload window set to "Skip Duplicates" and I have uploading paused and then I drop a bunch of images into the list that are duplicates. Then, I change to "Allow Duplicates", it doesn't change the status on the duplicates in the list (this only occurs if image uploading is paused). They still say "We have this file already. Replace or allow duplicates.". It should start uploading those or mark them as Ready for Upload. Same issue for setting it to Replace Duplicates.
7. I'm impressed. The HTML uploader seems to know when a JPEG is too large before it attempts to upload it.
8. After I'd put a bunch of things in the upload list and paused uploading, I then wanted to clear out the list. It let me delete every item in the list by clicking on the Red X except one item that had already uploaded. It wouldn't let me remove that item. Not a serious problem, but some sort of logic problem.
9. You have this nice indicator in the left hand column. The images that have been uploaded show nice and clearly with the green checkmark. But, the other indicators are not as easy to tell apart at a glance. The Duplicate Exists indicator looks like a grayed out something that is not discernible. The Queued indicator is also pretty faint. Why not make these easily discernible and obvious, particularly using color so we can more easily see at a glance what is left to go.
10. Why not let us sort by the upload indicator column so we can collect all the like types together (particularly to see what uploads are still queued)?
11. When an upload fails for some reason (in my case, I interrupted the internet connection to test this), the image says "Upload failed". But there does not appear to be any way to try it again. If one does a long upload and some images fail because of connectivity issues or Smugmug issues, how is one supposed to retry the upload?
12. If I was uploading hundreds of images and let it run overnight, it would be nice to have some sort of summary for what happened and whether there were any errors. As it is now, I have to scroll the entire list to see whether any single image failed.
13. Is there a reason you aren't showing a thumbnail of the images in the list to help us know what we've already put in the list?
14. When you're doing a large upload (say 100 images), can you show some better overall progress indicator so we can gauge roughly how far through the overall upload it has completed. Something like "15 of 105 remaining to upload" would be very useful for larger uploads. Likewise, I'd like to see an accounting of the errors so we know how many didn't make it so far.
15. Do you have any automatic retry logic when there are connectivity errors or temporary Smugmug hiccups? The most frustrating thing that can happen on a large upload is you start it, go to bed, then come back to check it the next morning and it stopped after the 5th image and you still have 95 more to go. You've lost hours of productivity at that point and generally get steaming mad.
16. What happens when Smugmug goes into read-only mode in the middle of an upload? Ideally, the uploader should recovery automatically, but at least it should be easy for the user to come back and restart easily.

Andy

Many thanks, John. I made sure Brian got this feedback!

SPK64

Been trying to get this to work but seems to always start the simple uploader.
Also starting inside an albun clicking upload to this gallery.

Clicked the link both standard and the customdomain version and both say HTML5 enabled

Using Windows 7, Firefox 3.5.11

Any ideas?

jhofker

This is awesome. :-)

Have you guys tried it out with the IE9 platform preview? I'll be giving it a shot next time I upload photos to see how it goes.

fabthi

I'm using it with Opera 10.61 on MacOs 10.6.4 (Snow Leopard) and it works fine and fast!

Andy

This uploader is now live and out of Beta: Release Notes. Thanks and enjoy!

jksmf

I'm using FF 3.6.12 on Windows.

The "old" Java uploader use to let me drag folders into the window and would just automatically upload the images / movies. When I tried this AM with the HTML5, it gave me an error, and I had to actually select the pics and drop those in.

Anyone else getting the same issue?

Allen

Where's the pause, skip dups, etc. selections? Don't see it here.

Edit: found it.
This is not good. It shows AFTER you drag a photo/s in the box and it/they start
uploading. No way to preselect.

Dragged big file (movie) in and paused upload. Do not see anyway to delete this upload other
then exiting page. But there are others in there for upload and I'd lose them all.

No progress shown for each photo, just the spinning wheel.
Missing progress stat at bottom? I used it to see my internet connection speed.
This is a major degrade.

Dragged folder in and get wrong file type. It didn't look inside folder for files, just looked at the folder.

Andy

SPK64 wrote: »

Been trying to get this to work but seems to always start the simple uploader.
Also starting inside an albun clicking upload to this gallery.

Clicked the link both standard and the customdomain version and both say HTML5 enabled

Using Windows 7, Firefox 3.5.11

Any ideas?

Update your Firefox to 3.6+

Andy

Allen wrote: »

Where's the pause, skip dups, etc. selections? Don't see it here.

Edit: found it.
This is not good. It shows AFTER you drag a photo/s in the box and it/they start
uploading. No way to preselect.

Dragged big file (movie) in and paused upload. Do not see anyway to delete this upload other
then exiting page. But there are others in there for upload and I'd lose them all.

No progress shown for each photo, just the spinning wheel.
Missing progress stat at bottom? I used it to see my internet connection speed.
This is a major degrade.

Dragged folder in and get wrong file type. It didn't look inside folder for files, just looked at the folder.

Allen, some of these will be added in V2 of this release. Remember, you can always use the Java uploader that you've been used to using for so long

Allen

Andy wrote: »

Allen, some of these will be added in V2 of this release. Remember, you can always use the Java uploader that you've been used to using for so long

The simple uploader has the pause, dup selection box missing also.
Do not get it until photo is dragged in. And the status at bottom is also
gone. Did they dumb down the simple uploader to match the new one?
Seems so. :pissed

Andy

Allen wrote: »

The simple uploader has the pause, dup selection box missing also.
Do not get it until photo is dragged in. And the status at bottom is also
gone. Did they dumb down the simple uploader to match the new one?
Seems so. :pissed

We didn't change the simple.. can you please show us what you are seeing?

Allen

Andy wrote: »

We didn't change the simple.. can you please show us what you are seeing?

Removed, cache, all cookies first. Switched to Simple. It's the same as the new one.
Looks like I can't get to the old Simple?
Edit: IE8 shows this same screen shot for simple uploader.

Mox

Yikes! No progress bars, no x out of y files successfully uploaded status at the bottom. It scrolls VERY poorly. As has been said, I can't set it to skip duplicates before dragging files in. Looking forward to V2, I guess, but relieved to see I can use the old one for now.