Smugmug app-why can't they make a decent one?
gale1965
Registered Users Posts: 8 Big grins
I have so many issues with the app and tonight, yet another. Because the auto upload is so bad and so buggy, I opted to manually upload from time to time. With the holidays i went longer (and of course took more pictures) than usual. Now I have a lot of pictures to upload. So i start them and about 1/4 of the way through, boom-upload failed. Will try again later. No good reason for it-the internet here is fine. The smugmug site seems fine. But now I have to wait until whenever because there doesn't seem to be any way to force it to retry other than canceling it all, figuring out what did and did not upload, and starting over the ones that didn't. And it doesn't upload in any kind of order so sorting out the uploads from the waiting is a pain. And I have to leave in a few hours which means it will either upload on data or not at all. Am I the only one that hates this app?
Comments
Hey Gale,
As I have mentioned in my reply to your email - this may be an issue caused by your internet connection. I have tested this on an old Nexus 6P and iPhone X and on both everything worked fine. Please run those tests that I have mentioned in my message to you and reply to my message with the results so we can help you further.
I have had lots of problems with the app too... I'm on Android w/ a Samsung Note 5. My overall feeling about it is that SmugMug is simply trying too hard to keep the app extremely minimalist. The trouble with that is: many of us, certainly those of us w/ Pro sites and/or huge numbers of galleries & photos, need lots more info & real-time feedback in order for the app to be fully useful. Yes, even if & when you're able to see what uploaded & what didn't, you have no recourse or way of interacting w/ the upload stream to find out why, or to tell it to try again w/ the failed ones.
I was extremely thrilled to see that they added my suggestion to "upload only when charging", & I'm so thankful for that-- it helps immensely! But there are lots of bugs that need work. Sometimes auto-uploads just randomly don't happen for a couple wks & I don't realize they're not happening. Other times, such as a couple days ago, when I set auto-uploads to go to a new gallery (I usually have 2 dated galleries per month), the app will suddenly upload every single photo from my phone! (even ones it's uploaded before). Now I have to go sort that out.... 1000s of pics in one gallery... ugh. The app also needs a way to decide whether or not videos get uploaded.
An example of the minimalist thing is, you can't even see that option to "only upload over Wi-Fi while charging" etc until after you've selected a gallery for your uploads. It doesn't appear in the initial settings, at least not on the Android app. And there are so few settings. Another tough part for me is that the wording is so weird that it makes my head hurt trying to figure out the meaning... to my way of thinking, it feels like things are stated in reverse, making them very counter-intuitive. It's wording such as "offline downloads" & "make videos available offline" that take way too much thought, & we don't always know the exact meaning of "to sync" (what, precisely, is going to "sync", & how?!) Instead of "offline downloads", how about "downloads to this device". Instead of "make videos available offline", how about "download videos to device"? I contend that "offline" is too geek-speak... since most of us are holding a device in our hands that's "online", adding pics to it doesn't feel like "offline", even though I s'pose it's the tech-y way to say it. I know minimalism is still all the rage, but it's just not fun when what you really need is options, not a "look".
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I've logged into DGrin to share exactly the same frustration.
I know my internet connection is shoddy. I'm stuck in some shithole hotel in some shithole country and it has shitty internet*. I can't do anything to fix that. I wont even name the hotel or country because this is my 18th country in the last ten weeks and I've had this issue in most of them.
What I would like to be able to do is hit 'Share' on Android, tell it to share via Smugmug, tell Smugmug where to put the images and have them get there. Being told 'No connection' when a quarter of a second later I get new email through the alleged lack of connection isn't helpful. Being told 'Connection dropped' when the connection drops every eight seconds isn't helpful. Being told 'Will retry when there's a connection' when there's a connection now isn't helpful.
My workaround is to cancel the uploads and share again but please, if Smugmug do at any point decide to update or revise the android app, please add some fault tolerance into its upload code and allow the user to manually force retries.
It's just terribly frustrating when it takes ten minutes of interacting with your phone to get six photographs uploaded.
("There was an error performing your request. Please try again." - can't even post to DGrin without multiple tries)