jfriend
Jun-14-2007, 02:05 PM
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...
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...