Photo uploads not working?

5 x 4.22Mb - perfect uploading 16:15
https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/observation/832998/
I have some 7mb to do in a minute.
I usually reduce to under 3mb

Eventually uploaded this project
https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/project/833016/
a few attempts - the site locked out 19:45 - usually failures and errors without notice
Eventually loaded it up in stages. displays well. Deleted previous version.
Site runs well when it’s running!

Yep - we saw that and restarted the server but it just went down again.

Was working about 30 minutes ago. Down again. Someone needs to give it a highly technical adjustment. Or hit it with a hammer.

Yes, it does sound as though the problem server is trying to tell them something. I guess the folk who are trying to use the site as part of their coursework must be getting even more fed up than we are. (And they’re paying; we’re not!)

Just uploaded 2 observations with no problems. One with 9 photos of around 1.3Mb each, the other with 2 photos (5.6Mb + 1Mb).

1 Like

Thanks for that. We did recently allow for far larger uploads and I was concerned it was that change that is leading to the recent issues. I’ve tried between five and eight 10Mb JPGs on our staging server - which hardly sees any traffic at all - and it never completed.

I wonder what size of files users are creating? I know my fairly old Canon SLR creates JPG files of around 7Mb while the even older MicroSoft phone produces files around 1-1.5Mb. I guess more modern kit, as is the way of such things, produces even larger files. Files for web display don’t usually need to be so big. I’m generally pretty computer-savvy but I don’t know of any easy and reliable way of shrinking files before posting them. In the land of happy dreams this would happen behind the scenes as the user sends the file :slight_smile:

My Canon 6DII can make 10Mb JPGs. My iPhone can make 6Mb JPGs. Its not just the issue of uploading, its the processing too. iSpot makes five different versions of each successfully upload image and this processing has to be done by the same “engine” that’s handling all of the other page builds and database requests.
There isn’t any automatic means to get the browser to resize the files before sending, but having considered that, its beneficial to have high resolution files simply because they show more detail.

iSpot mark 1 did shrink image files as you uploaded them - presumably by loading them into memory as bitmaps and selecting a JPEG quality level before committing them to the server.

Apparently you can do it with HTML5 and Canvas. But that’s quite recent technology as its only now that browsers have to necessary poke to do stuff like that.

Dear all

Please note the following Notification now posted on iSpot:
iSpot will be offline from 4 p.m today October 7, 2021!: There have been some technical problems with the iSpot website and we will take the site offline for a few hours from 4 p.m. today to apply fixes. Look out for further updates on this. We apologise for any continuing inconvenience and thanks for your patience!

Dear All
Please note our Updated Notification Message on iSpot:
Thank you for your patience with our ongoing issues with the iSpot website. We have now rolled out some code changes and some server tweaks that we hope will make a significant impact on the unacceptable number of outages. We are continuing to monitor performance.

Thanks for the updates. Seems to be working well this evening! Thanks.

1 Like