Reliable, network-interruption-tolerant supported uploader?

jfriend

I regularly see lots of upload questions regarding upload errors, incomplete uploads, uploads where 97 out of 105 images successfully uploaded, etc... If users even realize what happened, they are advised to go look at the upload log, figure out which images failed and manaully re-upload those. What a painful user experience. Obviously, the population at large is experiencing some unreliability in the upload process since we see posts about it here pretty much everyday. It's not easy for us to tell if it's at the Smugmug servers, on their internet route to Smugmug, in their ISP or related to their own local network or computer. Probably, there is some of all contributing.

I've been using third party uploaders and am not that familiar with the Smugmug-supported options, so this raises the following question: "Is there a reliable, supported uploader that, when you ask it to upload 100 images, it will not stop until it has successfully uploaded and verified the upload of those 100 images?"

Since I deal with wireless applications in my day job, we have to assume the connectivity is unreliable and all our apps take responsibility for reliably delivering content even if the network has issues. Since so many customers seem to be having problems like this on the wired internet, I'm wondering if Smugmug has a company-supported uploader that takes this approach?

An uploader with this approach would never quit with an error. It might report the current status (including any problems it was currently experiencing) and it might let you cancel the upload if you wanted, but it would continue trying until all 100 images you asked to upload were uploaded, no matter how many problems occurred along the way. The last step in the upload process would be to query the gallery and verify that everything it thought it had successfully uploaded now appears in the gallery. Any discrepencies could be reuploaded. Errors along the way would just cause a fresh query of what's in the gallery already vs. the upload list and then restart the upload in the appropriate place. Etc...

devbobo

G'day John,

Yes, this is definitely something we want to do across the board on all uploaders.

I have been fixing some problems in the Mac Uploader recently...and while I was at it I changed the underlying calls from XML-RPC to JSON.

It's definitely on my list of stuff to do, I just need to be comfortable with the code for each uploader before I start changing stuff too dramatically.

Cheers,

David

iamback

Apart from "Just get it done" or "Cancel" a "Pause / Resume" option would be great.

Sometimes you just have to get your full bandwidth for something else while an upload job might still be running.

DJKennedy

I can't use the drag n drop uploader anymore. A real pain if you ask me.

In the log I never see the thumbnails so I am not able to see what the problem is/was.

I drag n drop, the status bar starts, if more than one photo the thumbnail in the uploader changes - but in the end they report no files recieved. And nothing in the log.

AngryScot

How about a continuing status of the upload
I started a large gallery upload from home last night and it is still going this morning, I see no way of checking the status of the upload. The stats only appear to hold info once the upload has completed. Even a 12 of 500 completed would be better than nothing.

Plus when adding the images to an existing gallery the in progress and completed ones are not visible until the whole upload is complete, why is this? Why can't I see the items already uploaded as the rest are completing? Is frustrating waiting and waiting when some of the items are already been uploaded (I can of course see the previous completed uploaded images)......

thanks!
**rant**
edit: My upload was succesful! 0 pictures uploaded after 8hours of trying! woohoo! Will check my system at home but I know at least a few made it but did not get displayed. Oh and the log shows no errors! Just stellar! **rant off**:pissed

devbobo

AngryScot wrote:

I started a large gallery upload from home last night and it is still going this morning, I see no way of checking the status of the upload. The stats only appear to hold info once the upload has completed. Even a 12 of 500 completed would be better than nothing.

Plus when adding the images to an existing gallery the in progress and completed ones are not visible until the whole upload is complete, why is this? Why can't I see the items already uploaded as the rest are completing? Is frustrating waiting and waiting when some of the items are already been uploaded (I can of course see the previous completed uploaded images)......

thanks!
**rant**
edit: My upload was succesful! 0 pictures uploaded after 8hours of trying! woohoo! Will check my system at home but I know at least a few made it but did not get displayed. Oh and the log shows no errors! Just stellar! **rant off**:pissed

G'day Scot,

i assume that you are referring to the Picasa uploader. I have explained the issues about uploading large batches over here.

Cheers,

David