"Birds are, quite simply, little miracles - and as such they require care and consideration."
Magnus Ullman
My Flickr account is here
The last big thread I posted had 27 photos (all under 1.5MB). It took me nearly 3 hours to upload them although the usual upload time for a post of this size (in my experience) is around 2 hours or so. I have to agree with Limpy, and often find myself thinking 'is it worth it'. Some of the photos I was trying to upload took up to 12 times to load. Even the dialog box to enable the upload often comes up, but remains blank and has to be re-opened several times before even moving on to selecting an image to upload. Very frustrating and off putting!! I really hope the 'powers that be' can do something to improve this, but having read complaints such as this before, I'm not too hopeful.
Paul
My bird photos HERE
Mrs T.
The web team, must have had a very long meeting. As there has still been no reply from them. Or should we not be surprise.
Hello,
Thanks for bearing with us on this. We are aware of this issue and realise it is frustrating. The web and community are in a state of review as a whole, in order to improve them, and we will update you when there are significant developments.
Maurice
I am having trouble uploading photo's as well. Every time I try I get jpg and no photo.
I cannot get the old way like we used to have. I agree with Limpy it is frustrating.
J
I have tried looking and so far it seems ok
I can honestly say I have given up on the multiple image loader but I would like to think that simply being able to upload photos knowing I won't get an error message is a realistic hope. I do try to reduce the size of my photos without sacrificing any picture quality but when I get one of those endless error messages, even for screen captures less than 1kb, it really does get disheartening.
Our herring gulls are red listed birds. Think about that the next time you hear some flaming idiot calling for a cull of them.
Clare, I understand your frustration at the difficulty you've had posting photos. However, until improvements can be made we've got to try to make the best of it and work round the limitations of the software and/or hardware.
I've been looking at some of the Starling murmuration photos you posted on the MInsmere group. I notice that they are all very large files, not very much less than the 4 Mb limit. Don't take offence but I'm not altogether surprised that you struggle to upload them. I think you could reduce the size significantly without degrading the image that appears on the screen. I've done some experiments to see what could be achieved.
This is your original image (3.7Mb, 3888x2592 px). I managed to upload it but it was very slow.
This has had the file size reduced but the dimensions unchanged (1Mb, 3888x2592 px). It uploaded quite quickly.
This has had the file size reduced and the dimensions reduced (780kb, 1600x1067px). It uploaded quickly.
Can you see any notable difference in the image quality?
What I do is to reduce the image size and any necessary cropping and save it as a separate file before posting. I leave the original file untouched.
I can't say whether this would solve the errors that you keep getting but it might at least speed the uploading of the files you do manage to post especially if your broadband speed is not very fast.
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Tony
My Flickr Photostream
I've got used to the variable speeds of the uploading files, but I'm stumped as to why we get so many error messages. Did you get any of those when you tweaked the starlings, TeeJay? I do know that the file size makes no difference to them.
The only thing I can think of is that it might be a Java thing. I'm sure the error messages refer to Java when they come up.
No, I didn't get an error on this occasion, Clare, but I sometimes do if I try uploading large files.
I'm no expert on Java. I know you need Javascript which is something different from Java. I read about Java causing problems and I uninstalled it. As far as I know you don't actually need it.
As I said to Limpy in an earlier post I was getting constant failures to upload even small files a couple of months ago. The little upload bar would crawl across dialogue box, get near the end and then a green "error" would appear. Eventually, I tracked this down to a very slow upload speed. I reset my router and the problem was solved.
I've just done a speed test using http://www.speedtest.net/ and got 16.6 Mbps download and 1.05 Mbps upload. Before I fixed it the upload speed was down to a crawl.
Do you know what upload speed you are getting? I'm not saying this is the cause of your problems but it might be worth eliminating it as a factor.
We tend to blame all our woes on the Forum software/hardware, and I agree it's not good, but it does sound to me as though there is an issue with your computer system/broadband.