issues uploading "my species" photos

[Nabobmob1]

I keep getting error codes trying to upload pics of my fish. Are their size limitations? when I am able to load pics I have to upload to another source such as facebook and download them again.

[FishnFins]

Try resizing your photos. There are some free programs that have the feature.

[Jools]

Thanks for reporting this and providing a screenshot, that really helps track down the issue.

At the time of writing, the size limit is 20MB and the image must be narrower than 16000 pixels. So, it allows pretty huge images to be uploaded and then it should resize them. The process and limit for forum attachments is different, I am talking here only about uploading my cats / aquaria / blog images.

The error message displayed indicates that the upload has failed to identify the file type / format of the image (it looks like it should be a JPEG). I have tweaked the code a little bit, can you try again. However, this aspect of functionality always has been a bit flaky, so happy to continue to improve it if there is a specific issue.

If that fails, can you email me the image for me to test (webmaster@planetcatfish.com)?

Cheers,

Jools

[Nabobmob1]

Thanks for the prompt response Jools. I'm still having the issue and have emailed you one of the pics.

[Jools]

OK, so I got two pics from Matt to play around with. They were sent by email as attachments and saved to my hard drive, I didn't mess around with them or open them in any image manipulating program. I could not get either image to fail when uploaded to the test site and I even did one upload to the live environment and it worked fine.

Looking very closely at the code, the file size is not the issue. The problem is that the upload doesn't recognise the file as a valid JPG file. It is, but the metadata within the file might not be as expected. This is hard to prove as I think by the process of either saving it from my email or by it existing on my system then that problem is resolved.

I should also say that I am assume the behaviour is consistent, that's to say, an file that doesn't upload for Matt never work unless it is manipulated via facebook or whatever.

The work around should be to use some other image manipualtiion software and just save the file and then I think the chances are it will upload fine.

If you want me to code around this issue, which I don't mind having a look at doing, then you need to protect the files from any changes that may be placed on them during transport. Easiest way to do that it to zip the file and send it.

Hope that helps,

Jools

[Nabobmob1]

Thank you Jools,

I'm going to give this another go on my end this evening, otherwise I will compress a few pics and send them over.

No reason to make it a priority if I'm the only one having the issue, just blame me and my camera. I'm sure you have plenty of other projects to focus on.

Thanks for the great support.

Matt

[MatsP]

Can we have an update? Is this working or not? It looks like there are several pictures uploaded to your "My Fish" and "My Breeding Log", but I can't see WHEN they were uploaded.

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Mats

[Nabobmob1]

Greetings Matt,

Unfortunately I'm still having issues. I sent Jools a link to unaltered files because I'm unabl to Zip on my machine. I downloaded the file from this link to my office PC and had the same issue. I will PM you the link as well.

[MatsP]

Ok, I will have a look when I get home (I have seen your PM).

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Mats

[MatsP]

Ok, so I managed to reproduce, and fix, the problem on my local copy of the DB. There was a bit of missing code handling "when we haven't succeeded in uploading the file", and I suspect that there's a setting on the official system that is limiting the uploads. I will discuss the details of that with Jools in email, since I'm pretty sure discussing configuration of the official site won't actually benefit anyone reading this - I can't edit the official site configurations, only Jools can do that (which is probably a good thing, as you can seriously break things by changing those sort of settings, and I'll let Jools take that responsibility ;) ).

Updates to at least give a (little) more meaningful error message saying "An error occurred during the upload, error code=X" will be going to Jools for uploading to the site shortly [I just need to make sure I haven't left any debug code in there before I hit the "submit" button for it].

In the meantime, a workaround would be to reduce the size of your images - the compressed JPEG is around 16MB, and whilst that's allowed by our rules, we don't display anything like that size, so using a photo editor to reduce the size to, say 1000 pixels along the longest size, would make the image much smaller - making the upload noticeably faster too (even at a local network, your pictures take quite a few seconds to upload to the "toy" server that I use, It can only be worse over the internet)

[Edit: I resized one of the images to 1000 x 667 pixels, and it went from nearly 16MB to 640KB, which means it should upload about 25 times faster]

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Mats

[Nabobmob1]

Thank you Mat,

I figured resizing would help, I'm just in the habit of taking the highest quality image I can on the off chance it turns out really well and I want to use it in another medium. Then when I convert the RAW file to JPG I usually don't bother with resizing. Until recently its not been an issue, but as I've mentioned to Jools I really don't need the to have CRT and JPEG so ludicrously large, and should change my habits.

Thank you for your time and effort!!!

[MatsP]

I understand, it's much easier to just "convert as is", than to consider what it's for, etc. I use Linux and a software called Photivo to convert from RAW, and I set mine to 1000 pixels on the long side for online use - mostly because it means that it's not going to take too long to upload - but I live in the middle of nowhere, and the broadband choices and speeds are pretty much rubbish, whichever you pick...

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Mats

[Jools]

Matt,

Mats has supplied a new version of the code to me and I've checked it out and uploaded it. It refines error checking and allows even larger files to upload (although that was not the issue). It is online now - want to check it out?

Jools

[Nabobmob1]

initially it still failed [edit: and I tried several times]





but did post if I resized to 1000px


*** Second edit: Jools, do you use user photos of "My Cats" and "BLogs" on the species pages? The main reason I've become so active on the site is to contribute to it and funds aren't always an option.

[Jools]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the screenshot, most useful.

So, I don't see anything here to move me away from the opinion that something in (or not in) the image file is confusing our system and it doesn't understand this is an image file. The process of resizing the image on your computer fixes that issue and so it's then uploaded OK.

However, Mats has added some code/log info to the process, so I will sit back down and see what that / Mats has to add.

Cheers,

Jools

[Jools]

*** Second edit: Jools, do you use user photos of "My Cats" and "BLogs" on the species pages? The main reason I've become so active on the site is to contribute to it and funds aren't always an option.

Yes, however the "My stuff" uploads are self-service, the Cat-eLog species pages are a case of emailing me images for me to add (although I can grant admin access to do that kind of thing too). The general rule being is if they are great quality then add them (especially if not pics or replacing existing pics of poor quality), if they are half decent quality and show something not already shown (e.g. eggs, fry, habitat, sexual dimorphism, ID characteristics, lateral, ventral, and dorsal views, albinos, colour varieties etc etc etc).

Cheers,

Jools

[MatsP]

Yes, the new code is working as it should - it doesn't try to figure out what size the failed upload is, because it detects that the upload failed, and prints the error code for the failure.

The error code 1 in this case means "file too large" - which in turn is related to one of the settings I sent Jools an email about yesterday - I will send an update to clarify, as I think there's a little bit missing. I don't know what the actual settings are on the site, but it would seem that it's "below 16MB".

I've added a comment in the code (R1450) with a link to all the possible error codes. I don't think this is useful for most people, so it's just a comment in the code where the error message is generated.

And although we would like to fix this, I would still encourage "reduce the size of your images" - not only will it upload quicker, it also helps the site by not having to resize a 16MB file down to a file of a couple of hundred KB.

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Mats

[Jools]

OK, I understand where we're at now. There is a server limit to the max upload file size and there is a "planetcatfish" limit too in our code. I've been fiddling around with the latter but it appears it is the former that is the problem. It is set to fail if uploads are bigger than 10MB, I will look into amending that.

Detail here.

Jools

[Jools]

Matt,

Can you try uploading a file now? I've made a change that allows up to 32MB files to be uploaded and then we will see if the system can handle them beyond that point...

Jools

[Nabobmob1]

Now I'm getting errors everywhere, even when I complete the fields

[MatsP]

I had that same problem (which is caused by a separate limit in the site configuration file), which I've told Jools about. Should be sorted as soon as Jools gets round to changing that file and restarting the webserver.

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Mats

[Jools]

Matt,

At first I was worried about this as I didn't understand it, then Mats tested out some settings on his development server and came up with the last post / solution. Turns out there is a server side parameter for the maximum size of an upload, but there is also a maximum "payload" size for data uploaded when you click submit.

On our production server that payload was set to 7MB. So, while you were now allowed to upload a large file ("fixing" the first problem), it and the few bytes of text submitted were then more than 7MB and so our code thought there was nothing submitted. Meh.

Anyway, I've not set both server limits to 32MB, it takes about 30 minutes for the settings to take affect across all sites. By the time you read this, it should be (if you don't mind the effort) worth another go!

Cheers,

Jools

[Nabobmob1]

Uploaded flawlessly.

Thank you Both for your help and hard work!!!!!

[MatsP]

Time to move this to "resolved".

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Mats

[Jools]

It is, glad to put this one to bed at least for now. I say that because any time we move server, configuration of these parameters will need to be done again.

Great it's fixed though!

Cheers,

Jools