Some possible smugmug issues?

flyingdutchie

Hi Smugmug Developers,

I've seen these issues on my site (www.streetsofboston.com).

Flickering of protected images:
This is an issue when i go to my galleries that contain protected images (e.g. http://www.streetsofboston.com/gallery/994065):

1. Go to the above gallery and select 'smugmug' or 'smugmug_small' style.
2. Click on the main picture, so that a pop-up shows with the selected picture.

From this moment on, it seems that the browser's cache has been invalidated!
E.g. this happens on both IE and FireFox:
1. When going back to my home page, all the pictures are re-downloaded (one can see the images downloaded one by one). I think this happens because their cached counterparts are invalid. Strange...

For protected images, this has an additional consequence. On IE, this results in a flicker:
1. When moving the mouse over any image (either a thumbnail or the main image), the className is changed for that image (imgBorder changes into imgBorderOn). 'Protected' images have the actual image in their style-property background-image: url(......);, and their src attribute is set to spacer.gif. Now, Changing the className will reload the image. But if the cache has been invalidated, you'll see a flicker:
- IE Shows the 'old' protected image.
- User moves mouse over protected image
- className of image changes (into imgBorderOn).
- IE needs to download the url() value of the background-image style.
- The cache is invalid. IE needs to download the image from smugmug: Old image on screen becomes blank temporarily.
- After the image is downloaded, the image is shown again.

My question is:
Why will the cache for smugmug-images become invalidated when this pop-up window is shown? Does the server send http-responses back for any image to become invalid, after this pop-up window is shown?


Invalidation of cache after closing browser:
When i close the browser, all the images from smugmug in the browser's cache expire. When i re-open the browser, i see all the images being re-downloaded (the appear one by one).

Question:
Why is this happening?


Change of nickname:
Currently, my smugmug-nickname is 'flyingdutchie'. My smugmug-URL is therefore flyingdutchie.smugmug.com. I recently pointed the domain www.streetsofboston.com to my site.

Question:
If i change my nickname to StreetsOfBoston, will the site flyingdutchie.smugmug.com still be valid and work? I'd like to show the 'StreetsOfBoston' nick instead of 'flyingdutchie' but i'd like the URL flyingdutchie.smugmug.com to be valid as well.
(i did a workaround by setting my account's First Name to "Anton Spaans" and my Last Name to "(Streets Of Boston)", but i'm afraid this could mess up my billing).


Thank you very much.
-- Anton.

Andy

flyingdutchie wrote:

Question:
If i change my nickname to StreetsOfBoston, will the site flyingdutchie.smugmug.com still be valid and work? I'd like to show the 'StreetsOfBoston' nick instead of 'flyingdutchie' but i'd like the URL flyingdutchie.smugmug.com to be valid as well.
(i did a workaround by setting my account's First Name to "Anton Spaans" and my Last Name to "(Streets Of Boston)", but i'm afraid this could mess up my billing).


Thank you very much.
-- Anton.

Anton, if you change your nick to streetsofboston, then flyingdutchie.smugmug.com ceases to exist.

I hope this helps,

Andy

Anton, thanks for posting the other questions. I'll let JT answer when he gets a chance....

{JT}

I have seriously tried everything that I can think of to fix the IE flickr problem - but it comes down to IE just plain sucking:

http://www.fivesevensix.com/studies/ie6flicker/

Feel free to change things on your end to see if you can fix it. Be sure to le me know if you do

flyingdutchie

{JT} wrote:

I have seriously tried everything that I can think of to fix the IE flickr problem - but it comes down to IE just plain sucking:

http://www.fivesevensix.com/studies/ie6flicker/

Feel free to change things on your end to see if you can fix it. Be sure to le me know if you do

That's why you 'double-buffered' the protected image, this is a work-around for this bug.
But the flicker happens on IE because the cache for smugmug-images has been invalidated. Why does the smugmug server tell the browser that any smugmug-image has expired after that pop-up window is shown? Even if i move back to my homepage, all the images on that page are re-downloaded.

I think the flicker will not be seen if the server does not deem all cached images to be invalid/expired.

If the server tells the browser that the image is still valid (cache of that image is still valid), the flicker won't happen, because it does not need to be downloaded, it is loaded from the cache instead. I wonder what the http-response headers of an image is before that pop-up window is shown and what it is after the pop-up window is shown.

Note that i have my IE cache-setting 'Check for newer versions' set to 'Automatically'. When setting it to 'Always', background-pictures are downloaded all the time, wasting bandwidth and elements with a background-image will flicker.

But when 'Automatically' is set, the image is 'downloaded' from the browser-cache, if the image has not expired, and the flicker won't happen. Try the 'Automatically' setting and go to this site: http://www.fivesevensix.com/studies/ie6flicker/
You will see that the flicker doesn't happen (as long as the http-responses don't invalidate the images).

onethumb

flyingdutchie wrote:

That's why you 'double-buffered' the protected image, this is a work-around for this bug.
But the flicker happens on IE because the cache for smugmug-images has been invalidated. Why does the smugmug server tell the browser that any smugmug-image has expired after that pop-up window is shown?

Again, this is a *browser bug*, not a smugmug bug. We do *not* tell the browser that any smugmug images have expired. In fact, even when browsers have self-expired images (which they do from time-to-time), we rarely re-send the bytes ... instead we just tell them "no, your expired entry is fine, continue to use it".

Check the HTTP response headers if you don't believe me.

It's not our fault that IE6 behaves badly, I'm afraid.

Don

flyingdutchie

onethumb wrote:

Again, this is a *browser bug*, not a smugmug bug. We do *not* tell the browser that any smugmug images have expired. In fact, even when browsers have self-expired images (which they do from time-to-time), we rarely re-send the bytes ... instead we just tell them "no, your expired entry is fine, continue to use it".

Check the HTTP response headers if you don't believe me.

It's not our fault that IE6 behaves badly, I'm afraid.

Don

I checked the headers... and you're right, they look fine. And, what i saw happening on FireFox as well at home (images re-downloaded when moving to another page after showing a pop-up with a single image), i can not reproduce here at work.

But it still happens on IE. It seems that when IE shows a pop-up window, something happens with the browser-cache for images (and other resources?).... Thank you IE! <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/headscratch.gif&quot; border="0" alt="" >

For protecting images: Is putting the images in the background (background-image) instead of using the <img src="..."/> the only way to protect them?
-- Anton.