Problem Uploading 2 Photos to smugmug

wxwax

I'm casting about for general feedback from computer savvy folks, hoping you can help me understand a problem.

I have 2 photographs that will not upload to smugmug. I go through the normal upload procedure. After the normal wait, when the upload window closes, the smugmug summary says "0 files loaded." I am able to upload other photographs, just not these two.

Some background is relevant. Last week a virus or a trojan or something shut down my machine, wouldn't let me boot into windows. I've worked through that problem, and have full functionality. I'm *not* convinced that the machine is clean, however. I've been running a ton of anti-virus software, and have posted my Hijack This log on a help site. They say the Hijack This log is clean. The software I'm running also shows my machine to be clean. But one of them will return a hit a day later, saying I have a Trojan, even though I haven't been on the internet. So I clean it out again. But obviously, there's something in the machine that's propogating the trojan alert. I should emphasize that I keep my photos on a separate, external hard drive, which has consistently proven to be clean.

Back to the 2 photos that won't upload. I Photoshopped the 2 photos after I fixed the reboot problem. They weren't the only ones - I worked on others as well. The others all upload normally to smugmug. It occurred to me that perhaps the problem jpegs became infected and that smugmug would not accept them. So I've gone back to the saved TIFFs (not the RAW files), made changes to the shots, saved them again and changed the slugs: still they will not upload.

I've e-mailed them to myself, tried uplinking them from work. No luck. I've put them on a zip, along with a test photo, tried to uplink them from work. The test photo uplinks fine. But no luck on the 2 shots in question.

So I'm out of ideas. :scratch Anyone else have any suggestions?

ian408

If you mail them elsewhere, do you get any sort of virus warning?

How did you scan your computer? Often, the best way is to do that is in "safe" mode.
You may also need to follow a special set of instructions for dealing with a machine
that is infected before the scanning software is installed.

There are several of viruses that mutate into something else to continue their
work. That might explain why you seem not to be rid of the virus.

I would suggest searching your virus sftwr mfg's web site for symptoms similar to
yours.

Ian

wxwax

Thanks ian.

No, no virus warnings from either my e-mail company, nor my highly protective work computer.

I'll take your suggestion and run the anti-virus software in Safe Mode (if the programs are accessible in that mode.) And I'll search the various manufacturers for advice about installing their software on previously infected machines.

Thanks for your suggestions, ian.

ian408

I could tell you what I think of the virus writters but then I'd get
banned.

Having to clean up after their "fun" or whatever costs nights....

ian

onethumb

wxwax wrote:

I'm casting about for general feedback from computer savvy folks, hoping you can help me understand a problem.

I have 2 photographs that will not upload to smugmug. I go through the normal upload procedure. After the normal wait, when the upload window closes, the smugmug summary says "0 files loaded." I am able to upload other photographs, just not these two.

Some background is relevant. Last week a virus or a trojan or something shut down my machine, wouldn't let me boot into windows. I've worked through that problem, and have full functionality. I'm *not* convinced that the machine is clean, however. I've been running a ton of anti-virus software, and have posted my Hijack This log on a help site. They say the Hijack This log is clean. The software I'm running also shows my machine to be clean. But one of them will return a hit a day later, saying I have a Trojan, even though I haven't been on the internet. So I clean it out again. But obviously, there's something in the machine that's propogating the trojan alert. I should emphasize that I keep my photos on a separate, external hard drive, which has consistently proven to be clean.

Back to the 2 photos that won't upload. I Photoshopped the 2 photos after I fixed the reboot problem. They weren't the only ones - I worked on others as well. The others all upload normally to smugmug. It occurred to me that perhaps the problem jpegs became infected and that smugmug would not accept them. So I've gone back to the saved TIFFs (not the RAW files), made changes to the shots, saved them again and changed the slugs: still they will not upload.

I've e-mailed them to myself, tried uplinking them from work. No luck. I've put them on a zip, along with a test photo, tried to uplink them from work. The test photo uplinks fine. But no luck on the 2 shots in question.

So I'm out of ideas. Anyone else have any suggestions?

Email the zip file with the two bad and one good photos to smugmug's help box. We'll take a look at them. I imagine there's some corruption going on, we screen uploads pretty thoroughly when we get them.

Mention in your email that I asked for them.

Don

wxwax

onethumb wrote:

Email the zip file with the two bad and one good photos to smugmug's help box. We'll take a look at them. I imagine there's some corruption going on, we screen uploads pretty thoroughly when we get them.

Mention in your email that I asked for them.

Don

Thanks, Don. I should have specified that I had them on a zip disk, not in a zip file. But lemme see if I can teach myself to make a zip file. If I can, I'll happily shoot them to you. Thanks for taking a look at the this thread.

ian408

I have to ask. When you scan the computer, do you also scan the zip
disk? If so, is the disk write protected?

Ian

onethumb

wxwax wrote:

Thanks, Don. I should have specified that I had them on a zip disk, not in a zip file. But lemme see if I can teach myself to make a zip file. If I can, I'll happily shoot them to you. Thanks for taking a look at the this thread.

You can just attach all three in a single email, or even send seperate emails. Your call. Just thought it'd be easy if they were already zipped up.

Don

dkapp

How big are the pics? Smugmug has an 8mb limit. This has got me in the past.

Dave

wxwax

dkapp wrote:

How big are the pics? Smugmug has an 8mb limit. This has got me in the past.

Dave

They're the normal, full-size files from the 1DmkII that I have uploaded many times in the past.

wxwax

onethumb wrote:

You can just attach all three in a single email, or even send seperate emails. Your call. Just thought it'd be easy if they were already zipped up.

Don

OK, thanks Don. I'll send three separate e-mails, one per pic, all clearly labeled.

wxwax

dkapp wrote:

How big are the pics? Smugmug has an 8mb limit. This has got me in the past.

Dave

You got it, Dave. Ben was kind enough to spend a few minutes reviewing this dolt's files, and he tells me they're over the 8mb limit. Yet another example of my profund ignorance of matters technical. I guess I don't understand why two uncropped files from the same camera can be different sizes.

gubbs

On occasions I've noticed that the jpeg quality has somehow got to the maximum of 12, with this setting quite a shots will go over the 8

GREAPER

I think you will find file size varies not only with quality, but with the number of different colors in an image. The greater the variety of colors in an image, the greater the file size. I do not know enough to explain why that is, I have just noticed it.


convert an image to a sepia tone, save it at the same quality as the original, and compoare the file sizes.

wxwax

Very interesting.

Gubbsie, you make the files smaller by saving the jpeg at a setting other than 12?

onethumb

wxwax wrote:

Very interesting.

Gubbsie, you make the files smaller by saving the jpeg at a setting other than 12?

I recommend never saving at Photoshop's 12 setting. Amateurs and experts alike agree that Photoshop's 10 is for all intents and purposes identical to Photoshop's 12, both for display and for print, yet it's often half the size or less! Try it yourself: Save both and open them side-by-side. Artificially zoom in, even, and see if you can see any artifacts. Now check the file size. Now, pick your jaw up off the floor.

For the vast majority of professional images, Photoshop 8 is pristine. Only on certain rare subjects (do your own tests, generally it's where there might be difficult hard edges for the compression algorithm to compensate for) are there any tangible artifacts.

Most photos you see on websites around the web are saved at Photoshop's 6 setting. That's the best break between size and quality, and to the average person, there's no noticeable difference.

For those of you using other photo applications, which use an intelligent 0-100 scale, I don't have a mapping handy, but 80% is probably roughly Photoshop 10. I'm just guessing here. (On a side note, it's completely idiotic of Adobe of use a 1-12 scale while every other application in the world uses 0-100).

More info in the Compression section here: smugmug help on print quality

Don

pathfinder

wxwax wrote:

Very interesting.

Gubbsie, you make the files smaller by saving the jpeg at a setting other than 12?

I usually save my files as psd but, if I save jpgs for my use, I compress in PS to an 8, 9, or 10; never 12 for the reasons onethumb mentioned. When I upload to smugmug, I usually compress to 6 or 8, and convert the file to the sRGB color space.

But I do not use smugmug professionally - If I were, I would use 9 or 10 then. But a 12 compression can easily be three times the size of a a 10. And jpgs larger than a few megabytes are usually not needed unles your prints are going to be larger than 12x18 or so. I make nice images at 13x19 with 10D images.
Images with lots of colors and lots of fine detail - think - fall foliage and leaves - are MUCH larger than very simple graphical images with just a few colors. Images with grain - whether color or B&W - get VERY large very quickly also. B&W imges with grain can be 2 or 3 times the size they were in color if they are in the RGB color space and that is where I keep my B&W images to keep their tonality correct - like sepia, platinum, etc.

wxwax

pathfinder wrote:

I usually save my files as psd but, if I save jpgs for my use, I compress in PS to an 8, 9, or 10; never 12 for the reasons onethumb mentioned. When I upload to smugmug, I usually compress to 6 or 8, and convert the file to the sRGB color space.

But I do not use smugmug professionally - If I were, I would use 9 or 10 then. But a 12 compression can easily be three times the size of a a 10. And jpgs larger than a few megabytes are usually not needed unles your prints are going to be larger than 12x18 or so. I make nice images at 13x19 with 10D images.
Images with lots of colors and lots of fine detail - think - fall foliage and leaves - are MUCH larger than very simple graphical images with just a few colors. Images with grain - whether color or B&W - get VERY large very quickly also. B&W imges with grain can be 2 or 3 times the size they were in color if they are in the RGB color space and that is where I keep my B&W images to keep their tonality correct - like sepia, platinum, etc.

Excellent stuff, Pathfinder. Thanks. Hopefully, this will help others as well.

wxwax

onethumb wrote:

For those of you using other photo applications, which use an intelligent 0-100 scale

Editorial bias?

Don, thanks for that great info. You've really helped me understand and also put it in persepctive. As with Pathfinder advice, hopefully others here are learning the lessons along with me.

Excellent stuff, gentlemen.

marlinspike

Out of curiousity, why the 8mb limit anyways? I mean, since we are given unlimited server space I'm guessing space isn't the issue. I think even at 10 this 8mb limit would frustrate 1Ds and will very much frustrate 1Ds MkII users.
Richard

DJ-S1

wxwax wrote:

I guess I don't understand why two uncropped files from the same camera can be different sizes.

I'm no expert but I had compression explained to me this way once. If you have a large area that's the same value (color), then the algorithm can just say "everything from here to here is this value", which is easier (smaller) to do. If you have lots going on in the image, then it can't do that to large areas, and it takes more space.

My camera only shoots JPG, and the file sizes vary widely straight off the camera.

onethumb

marlinspike wrote:

Out of curiousity, why the 8mb limit anyways? I mean, since we are given unlimited server space I'm guessing space isn't the issue. I think even at 10 this 8mb limit would frustrate 1Ds and will very much frustrate 1Ds MkII users.
Richard

Nope, 30Mpx images fit very nicely at 10 within 8MB.

Since neither camer is near 30Mpx, they do very well at that size.

The issue is a complicated one, but suffice it to say, it has to do with RAM usage on the upload server, RAM and CPU usage on the image processing servers, and storage on our backend.

If there's no humanly noticeable difference between, say, a 24MB image and an 8MB image, we'd rather not save the 24MB image on our servers. If we had to save them at that size (and people have tried uploading 100-200MB images to us), we'd have to increase our prices. Since it would be a pointless price increase (since there's really no difference), we decided to nip it in the bud.

If you're even coming close to 8MB on any digital camera we know of (up to, and including the Mamiya 20Mpx backs), you're doing something wrong in your workflow.

You'd be surprised at how many people use their home scanners to scan in 120Mpx images, btw. From a 4x6 1-hour photo print, no less. *shudder*

Don

Andy

how about one of these?

onethumb wrote:

Nope, 30Mpx images fit very nicely at 10 within 8MB.

Since neither camer is near 30Mpx, they do very well at that size.

The issue is a complicated one, but suffice it to say, it has to do with RAM usage on the upload server, RAM and CPU usage on the image processing servers, and storage on our backend.

If there's no humanly noticeable difference between, say, a 24MB image and an 8MB image, we'd rather not save the 24MB image on our servers. If we had to save them at that size (and people have tried uploading 100-200MB images to us), we'd have to increase our prices. Since it would be a pointless price increase (since there's really no difference), we decided to nip it in the bud.

If you're even coming close to 8MB on any digital camera we know of (up to, and including the Mamiya 20Mpx backs), you're doing something wrong in your workflow.

You'd be surprised at how many people use their home scanners to scan in 120Mpx images, btw. From a 4x6 1-hour photo print, no less. *shudder*

Don

PerezDesignGroup

andy wrote:

how about one of these?

My jaw just hit the floor. WOW!

wxwax

andy wrote:

how about one of these?

Simply amazing.

Isn't there also a landscape photographer who designed his own camera, and makes enormous, unbelievably sharp prints?

PerezDesignGroup

By the way, what *was* wrong with the pics? Was it indeed EXIF or file corruption? Or did I miss that response?

Andy

wxwax wrote:

Simply amazing.

Isn't there also a landscape photographer who designed his own camera, and makes enormous, unbelievably sharp prints?

yeah sid .. and now i've to to think where did i see that article??? i know what yer talkin of though

wxwax

PerezDesignGroup wrote:

By the way, what *was* wrong with the pics? Was it indeed EXIF or file corruption? Or did I miss that response?

They were too large, over the 8mb size limit.

PerezDesignGroup

onethumb wrote:

Most photos you see on websites around the web are saved at Photoshop's 6 setting. That's the best break between size and quality, and to the average person, there's no noticeable difference.

Don

These are all great tips.

Speaking as a web designer, as soon as I get into the "Save for web" screen, I immediately start at 45 and work my way up slowly to 60. Normally I reserve 45 for thumbnails or smaller images and 60 for the large pics where moire can be clearly noticed. Anything above 60 is a waste as Don mentioned above.

And thanks, Sid!

gubbs

wxwax wrote:

Very interesting.

Gubbsie, you make the files smaller by saving the jpeg at a setting other than 12?

Sorry, missed that but it looks like you've got the answers already.
I save in 10 which is probably OTT for my purposes. My files are now are between 1-3mb depending on the colours & detail.
I was having exactly the same problem as you and read on here somewhere that 12 was unnecessary.

marlinspike

onethumb wrote:

If you're even coming close to 8MB on any digital camera we know of (up to, and including the Mamiya 20Mpx backs), you're doing something wrong in your workflow.
Don

Well, I'm coming up on 5mb with my dRebel but admittedly I like to save at 12 (maybe it's my imagination but after multiple saves I can tell a difference between 10 and 12, and since I don't like dealing with TIFF there are times when I do multiple saves after converting from RAW). I would have thought if my dRebel at 12 does 5mb a 1DsMkII at 10 would be over 8, but I guess JPEG compression is that good. On the subject of JPEG compression, I once heard of a newer type, I think JPEG 2000, that PS CS doesn't support. If it does one day support it, will/does smugmug?
Richard