Uploading Photos
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Each year, the "arms race" in digital cameras encourages us to take photographs with larger file sizes. And the zero-cost proposition of digital photography ensures that the number of photos we are taking soars. Hence we have thousands of photos, many of which are high resolution, piling up on our hard disks. The combined effect of a large number of photos and large file sizes creates a problem if you want to share your photos on the web, because uploading photos to the web is often a slow and cumbersome process. Many software uploaders only allow you to upload one or a few photos at a time, and the actual process is slow as bandwidth between your machine and the server constrains it. To solve this dilemma, most web sites that host digital photos have decided to reduce the file size of the photos before they upload, diminishing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted by up to 80%. The disadvantage to this solution is that often, at some point in the future, you will want the original file and it won't be there. You may upload one hundred photos today and in a year want five of them to publish a digital book, and you will be out of luck, because you will need the original, higher resolution photos. What to do? We let you decide. We'll either upload the original size, or give you one of three smaller sizes to choose from. Our Photo Loaders will use 15% jpeg compression, and pare the number of pixels in the photo down to the level you request. How we get these files to our server? We wanted to make sure that people using ZooFoo would not have to wait for either the Windows or the Mac Loader to load the files, whether they had a job of 5 photos or 10,000. So both versions of the ZooFoo Loader have a proprietary technology called "self-healing" photo uploading. Once you've installed the photo loader on your machine, a task that takes less than a minute, and you submit a batch of photos for upload, the Photo Loader on your computer communicates with the ZooFoo.com web server, and the two programs inform each other of your upload's status. The upload process is made difficult because we live in an imperfect world: personal computers go to sleep after a certain period of time, truncating the load, or camera batteries die, or Internet connections are lost. We designed our "self-healing" photo uploading technology with this in mind. If the machine goes to sleep, there is nothing we can do - by definition both Mac and Windows will not let us override the sleep function. We can beg, plead, even try to bribe the operating system, but to no avail. Microsoft and Apple have decided that sleep is a firewall, and there is no way through it. However, the moment the computer is restarted, our loaders begin to look for an Internet connection, and when they find it, they perform what is called a "handshake" with the server. That is, they ask the server if the last job from your machine completely successfully; if the server received everything it was expecting. The key word here is "expecting." Before any photos are transmitted for upload, the ZooFoo uploader tells the server what to expect. It sends a file ahead of time, giving the server knowledge of what is about to happen. If the server responds to the loader that it did not receive all the files, the loader asks which one was the last one it received, and it retransmits that photo as well as every other photo after it, until the job is successfully completed. This saves much time for you, as you do not need to be at your computer watching and monitoring the process: if you have a large upload to do, just let it run (though if you remember, it is faster to shut the sleep function off on your computer temporarily). In this way, using our self-healing upload technology, you are able to get large numbers of high photos uploaded to your ZooFoo web account at your choice of either speed or resolution. |