unsupported file error- every time i upload

spider-t · October 15, 2013

Hi all,

This bug has been plaguing me for a year or so. I have called support and they say they've never heard of it, can't figure it out and it's nice that I've found a workaround.

What happens is that every time I upload a gallery I get one or two unsupported file errors. It is usually the second and third file that fails. And if I drag those two files back into the upload window, they will upload without errors at the end of the upload.

This error seems to be independent of which browser I use and which internet connection I am on and which computer I use. If it were my code, I'd set up a trace and capture what is happening. It's simple to reproduce on all my computers.

But it sounds like I'm the only person in the world this is happening to and so it seems the cost/benefit of trying to find this problem and fix it is not high enough.

I really REALLY want to start my uploads after a long day and go home instead of waiting for each one to fail and then figuring out which two files failed in each of my 5 or 6 uploads and dragging them over. It bugs me. And it's broke.

Does anyone see this error? Maybe there are more of me out there?

See screenshot. thanks! Trish

spider-t · June 13, 2014

Still happens every every EVERY time I upload. I hate it. Really? no one else is seeing this?

thenickdude · June 13, 2014

Every time? That's pretty repeatable! I haven't struck this problem myself, but I guess I normally use Lightroom to upload photos.

There is a "switch to flash uploader" link at the bottom of the upload dialog you might try.

You can actually do some tracing of the issue yourself. Before you start your upload, in Google Chrome, click View -> Developer -> Developer Tools, and the tools should pop up. Head over to the network tab, then drag and drop your photos onto the SM uploader and watch it run.

The network tab records all the messages sent to SM's server, and can give a reason why requests failed. The file upload requests should be labelled "xmlrawadd.mg" on the left-hand side. See if you can spot any of those that are written in red (indicating that the request failed). What does it say in the "status" column for these red requests? Right click on a failed request, and in turn click "copy request headers", "copy response headers" and "copy response" and paste those one after another into a text document. Don't post them publicly, since they contain cookies that could be used to log in to your account (for at least until you sign out of your SM session, and potentially longer).

SM support might be able to spot the problem from that log data. Or if you like, I can take a quick look at the failed requests (n.sherlock@gmail.com).

sarasphotos · June 21, 2014

This has happened to me several times, including yesterday, and I upload only from Lightroom using Jeffrey Friedl's excellent plug-in. Yesterday when it occured I was updating five or 6 galleries simultaneously so I assumed that I had just overloaded things and cancelled the operations and started over. Eventually everything went ok, but it is annoying.

Cheers, Sara

spider-t · June 25, 2014

Awesome instruction thenickdude. Here are the results of my debugging.

I did a small upload: 55 files, in the 4MB-ish in size. So not that many, and not that big.

45 of the files succeeded, 10 failed to upload.
The first 6 show the error: "unknown file type"
The next 4 show the error: "Uploading Interupted. Please retry."

I've got the Network tab of the dev tools open and I see no failures at all. Status = OK for every line. And at the bottom of the screen it says 45 requests 132.4 KB transferred

So, if I'm reading this right, these 10 files did not fail in the network transfer, they were deemed un-sendable by the uploader. But whatever reason they were deemed un-sendable is not true when I upload that file a second time. So that seems broken to me.

Want to share my system? I'll be happy to make it break for some uploader coder.

Here's a link to the screenshot, I can't attach one that is large enough to be readable.
http://www.trishtunney.com/photos/i-R6qZmnx/0/O/i-R6qZmnx.jpg

It's a good thing your designs look so cool because probably would have quit you by now over this one.

thanks!
Trish

thenickdude wrote: »

Every time? That's pretty repeatable! I haven't struck this problem myself, but I guess I normally use Lightroom to upload photos.

There is a "switch to flash uploader" link at the bottom of the upload dialog you might try.

You can actually do some tracing of the issue yourself. Before you start your upload, in Google Chrome, click View -> Developer -> Developer Tools, and the tools should pop up. Head over to the network tab, then drag and drop your photos onto the SM uploader and watch it run.

The network tab records all the messages sent to SM's server, and can give a reason why requests failed. The file upload requests should be labelled "xmlrawadd.mg" on the left-hand side. See if you can spot any of those that are written in red (indicating that the request failed). What does it say in the "status" column for these red requests? Right click on a failed request, and in turn click "copy request headers", "copy response headers" and "copy response" and paste those one after another into a text document. Don't post them publicly, since they contain cookies that could be used to log in to your account (for at least until you sign out of your SM session, and potentially longer).

SM support might be able to spot the problem from that log data. Or if you like, I can take a quick look at the failed requests (n.sherlock@gmail.com).

thenickdude · June 25, 2014

Hi spider-t,

While I am *a* developer, and keen to solve an interesting problem, I'm not actually a SmugMug developer

.

Something curious is happening there, because it shows that 45 requests were made to the server, and 45 images are in the completed column. The implication should be that the final 10 images never even attempted to upload. However...

It's possible to get an error message "Unknown file type" without even contacting the server, which is based on the filename's extension being unrecognised. But that error message starts with a capital letter, and the error message in your screenshot starts with a lowercase letter. In order to get your error message, it'd have to have uploaded the image to the server, with the server having rejected the upload (likely due to finding that the uploaded image was corrupt), and returning its error message, which starts with a lowercase letter.

I tried that out here by uploading a corrupt photo (I renamed a .txt document to .jpg and uploaded that) and got the same error message as you displayed on the page, with nothing written in red in the network tab (the server actually did respond with an error message, but without marking the response red on the network tab, so it looks just like the successes). However, I didn't get the odd behaviour with the number of requests not adding up properly. And the image had to be really corrupt in order for the server to reject it like this; it didn't reject it when I scribbled a paragraph of text into the middle of a JPEG, nor when I removed the final half of the JPEG file.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that SmugMug is timing out and aborting your request because it was taking too long. This could end up passing a truncated file onto their upload code, which is then happily returning the error message to display on the page for you. Your connection isn't simply being dropped, because if that happened the server wouldn't be around any more to send its custom error message back to you.

I actually just tried out uploading a whole bunch of images and had the same errors as you! From watching the network tab during upload, it seemed like some uploads randomly stalled, and when the "sending" time stretched out to several minutes, the server ended up rejecting them. I wonder if your Internet is similar to mine - I've got terrible upload bandwidth, only about 800 kbps at maximum. The SM uploader's default is to upload 4 photos at once, which seems to put a lot of strain on things.

I'll do some more tracing tomorrow to narrow down the cause. I suspect that saturating my upload bandwidth causes some uploads to starve enough that they upload so slowly that SmugMug aborts the request, but I should be able to pin it down. If I do pin down the cause, I can probably fix it for us by limiting the number of simultaneous uploads (a feature I can provide through my SmugMug extension for Chrome).

thenickdude · June 25, 2014

spider-t, I think I've tracked down this issue and I'm going to report it to SmugMug to have the situation improved.

thenickdude · June 28, 2014

Hey spider-t, try the uploader again now. A tweak has now been implemented that should reduce error rates upon upload. I suspect that there are more tweaks yet to come that will improve the situation even more.

spider-t · July 2, 2014

thenickdude wrote: »

Hey spider-t, try the uploader again now. A tweak has now been implemented that should reduce error rates upon upload. I suspect that there are more tweaks yet to come that will improve the situation even more.

That is AWESOME! I just got back from a bunch of shoots and I'm going to start an upload tonight. I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks so much for digging into this form me. I am thrilled to know I'm not the only one who has ever seen this. My upload speed is pretty fast. It's usually around 3.5Mbps.

Status report soon!

spider-t · July 3, 2014

Ack. That didn't work. I uploaded 611 images and 596 got there. The rest got the lower case "unsupported file" error.

Let me know if I can offer any other info to help in the search.

Sorry so snarky the other night. I was so far behind on my deliveries that the broken uploader was really on my nerves.

thx,
Trish

thenickdude · July 3, 2014

That error rate at least looks a lot smaller than in your previous example (2.5% failures compared to 18%).

I'll add a feature to my Chrome extension to limit the number of simultaneous uploads to 1, which I think will reduce that error rate to zero (it did for me). I'll let you know when it's available to try out.

spider-t · July 3, 2014

thenickdude wrote: »

That error rate at least looks a lot smaller than in your previous example (2.5% failures compared to 18%).

I'll add a feature to my Chrome extension to limit the number of simultaneous uploads to 1, which I think will reduce that error rate to zero (it did for me). I'll let you know when it's available to try out.

It's true, that does look like a better error rate. But I think it might be inconclusive. I don't remember ever seeing more than 15 files fail on any of my uploads. And that previous case I posted with the small amount of small files might have been the worst case, percentage-wise, I have ever seen.

In the event this info is useful, when the error first showed up 3ish years ago, the 2nd and 3rd file would fail on every upload pretty consistently, and all the others would go through successfully. Then I would come back and upload those 2 one at a time to finish.

So if it's the same error, it seems it has gotten worse and more random over time.

Won't eliminating simultaneous uploads greatly increase my overall upload time? Or am I thinking of that wrong?

thanks!
Trish

unsupported file error- every time i upload

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