Multiple upload sessions?

The Lazy Destroyer

I did some searching and found a few threads mentioning this (and I've done this myself already) so I know it is possible to have multiple tabs open on a browser, each one uploading to a SM gallery. Some threads were older and I'm not sure if anything has changed.

I'm trying to speed up the time it takes me to upload to various galleries. I do 1k-4k images per event spread across a few galleries. I have been just doing each gallery (about 100-300 images per gallery) one by one during the day but this is becoming a nightmare even though I can be productive doing other things 90% of this time while I simply wait for them to finish. Especially because I have a day job which really limits when I can do this.

I hadn't considered letting them upload overnight while I sleep, since I may have many galleries to do. I'm not really interested in uploading all to a single gallery and them moving within SM because I have to organize them on my PC anyways before upload, so it would be a step backward.

So, my question: Is there a reasonable limitation on how many different upload sessions can be open on a browser to SM? I've done two sessions before (and seen the transfer rate split between the two obviously) but never any more.
If I could do 4 or 8, that would be a huge help. But would that be asking too much?
Is there anything I need to know to allow me to do this with little/no chance of a hickup or lockup during this time??

Thanks for the help!

-Blake

Ferguson

The question is probably more about your internet connection than Smugmug. Each session runs as one or more (I think quite a few more actually) communication streams. If your internet connection is like most it is faster down than up, so uploads are the slowest thing you can do on it.

As you saturate the connection packets start going slow enough they exceed the timeout internally of the stream and are retransmitted, and ultimately you start exceeding the limit at which point the connection fails.

Exactly when that occurs is kind of like asking when a wind storm will blow down a tree - depends on the wind, the tree, and the circumstances.

One suggestion is to try it. Take some test galleries and try 3, 5, 7, 10... however many you want. You don't need to let them run for hours, just 10 minutes or so. They MIGHT fail later than that, but once you get a point where they start failing be conservative, cut it in half maybe, and use that.

The problem what that, unfortunately, is that it also depends on other factors that may change over time, e.g. do you stream movies (or your kids), do you do a cloud backup that might fire off in the middle of your upload, or even in some home internet connections do you have a bunch of neighbors that at certain times saturate the link coming to your block. But it might get you close.

You might also consider something like Lightroom and publishing from it, as while it has many fo the same issues (a) you can queue up multiple events at a time by having them in folders and publishing the folder, it will do each gallery then consecutively, or (b) do a bunch of publishes at once, depending on it to keep track of what worked and what didn't, so you can easily re-publish and pick up where it left off.

The Lazy Destroyer

Thanks for the reply. I haven't tried integrating LR and SM yet, so I will look into this soon.
I understand it will surely rely on my connection here. But aside from that, it does sound like this is possible so I will experiment when I get some free time to see what I can typically get. Until then I might stick with 2 or so at a time as that seems to be reliable.

Ferguson

I'm a huge fan of the SM plugin for lightroom. I do multiple new galleries a week for sporting events, and am continually in a churn of edits and other changes to older galleries. With LR and the plugin, just put them once into the gallery you want, and it keeps track of all changes and will upload them later. It's also smart, so changing (say) a title of an image but not the image itself only uploads the title -- saving huge amounts of time if you frequently change things like keywords, titles, captions, etc.

It's of course possible to manage in the manual one, but the more "focused on my photography I get" (that's a new phrase for "the less I'm able to remember what I was doing") the more I depend on it to keep track of what's current and not and handle the uploads.