Assigning Photos - taking forever or failing

Photo assignment has been working well for me lately, but tonight, I just tried assigning 5 photos I had uploaded and we're back to the problem where assignment takes forever. For example, I might assign a photo to a member and press save and it would take a few minutes to complete the assignment. In one case, I waited over 10 minutes and canceled it and tried again.

So it looks like something is wrong with that web service again. Uploading works fine.

I'm doing this from the Directory on "Upload Photos," not via LCR or the individual photo uploads.

mevans wrote:So it looks like something is wrong with that web service again. Uploading works fine.

We could not even upload photos yesterday.

I'm having the same problem. Failing, try again, all the usual. I'm a veteran programmer so I've tried:
1. Three browsers - Chrome, Safari, Firefox
2. Two OSes - Windows, MacOS
3. Different schedules - do one (which sometimes works), try another. Or, do one and wait an hour (still fails). Do one and wait a day. (fail)

It seems odd to me how few people have posted on this in the last 12 months, given how many people have (or had) the issue.

Thanks for any ideas!
--Eben Visher

We have never had a problem that has been reported to me as ward clerk. However, we haven't had someone uploading photos for others for a few years. Members upload their own photos if they choose to and I review them. I have never had a problem (that I recall) approving any and no one has complained they could not upload their photos.

Dave,

Thanks so much for taking your valuable time to answer! I sure appreciate it.

SOLUTION: files over about 900 KB, fail. I re-made the failing files to all be 900 KB or less and everything is peachy.

I *wish*,

(1) That, foremost, the ASSIGN PHOTO PAGE made this limitation very clear!

(2) That the error had been much better explained on screen by the programmers, and that it would have told us *why* the upload fails. It basically says, currently, "Ha ha you're screwed. 'Why,' is secret." Actually, it doesn't even say that, come to think of it. It just sits and spins the hourglass forever.

(3) That any of the replies in the postings I saw, had prominently featured the cause, so we searchers could have immediately known the solution. I was clued by one respondent, in one long thread, pondering whether it had anything to do with file size.

As soon as I saw that hint, I sorted by size and it was obvious both that file size was the cause, and approximately where the dividing line is. It seems to be somewhere in the 900 KB to 1 MB range. That's why I chose 900 KB as the threshold. It appears clearly out of the danger region, at least today for me.

Btw, as for this 900 KB restriction (photo size limit), I think it is *perfectly* fine (but again, should be much more discoverable). For viewing on screens, just about any JPEG in the 200-700 KB range will appear perfect to about anyone when viewed on a screen. Probably even for printing in normal everyday sizes (e.g 5"x7" or less).

Thanks again. I can't tell you how warm and fuzzy it makes me feel to be offered your kind support.

--Eben Visher, Sacramento, California

Keep in mind that this forum is user to user help and not an official support channel for the church. Unless someone stumbles on your post who has experienced a similar problem, most won't have any advice to help you.

David,

Yes. I understand that, thanks for the reminder. This forum exhibits the same concern, love, and sharing that I experience in others. Thanks so much again for your time.

Also, keep in mind that the code underlying that application is getting old. There is working going on surrounding directory that will likely resolve some of those issues in the long-term, but you're not dealing with an application that is a bit aged.

Eben - thanks for reporting your observations. I'll try to remember what you found about size limits next time I'm having an issue uploading to see if that makes a difference for me. I can't remember if I experimented with different size uploads on photos in the past. I just remember many failures, but not so much lately.

Mev,

I solved the problem by resizing photos. Still, today, the Church's photo-upload web app simply hangs and does nothing if the photo is larger than somewhere in the low 900 KB range.

I resized my hanging photos to all be under 900 KB and then they worked. There might be a slightly higher size, e.g. 910 KB, but I thought,
"Why bother?" I'm sure 900 KB works and there is no discernable difference between a 940 KB JPEG file and one that is 900 KB.

If you don't know how to resize photos on your iPhone, Mac, or PC, I can point you in the right direction. (Presumably people who only have an Android phone have some app available, too.)

--Eben Visher, Sacramento, California

EbenVisher wrote:I solved the problem by resizing photos. Still, today, the Church's photo-upload web app simply hangs and does nothing if the photo is larger than somewhere in the low 900 KB range.

I had to upload some new photos today and I did some larger ones, just to test things. I had photos in the 1.3 - 1.7 MB range and they all uploaded quickly and assigned just fine.

Mevans,

Thanks. That provides another data point. Maybe there's another mechanism (also) involved. That's one thing I've always found frustrating about bugs - they're so buggy. Irregular, seemingly. Hard to track down.

Let's hope our experiences serve others well if they encounter upload issues such as I and many have had.

Thanks again for sharing your experience. I like the feeling that we're all in this together, helping an utterly *amazing* product.

--Eben

EbenVisher: I just had a thought: we should make sure we're both trying the same thing. There's more than one way to upload photos, and my experience has been that they behave differently.

I'm using the Upload Photos tab on the Local Unit Directory page (lds.org/directory). I'm doing a drag/drop operation to upload the photos. Is that what you're doing?

Mevan,

I had been doing it as you describe. I was uploading a bunch at a time, and some would fail. Lately, I've done this:

* Identify the cleaned-up, final version of a person's pic
* Go to that person's entry in the directory by using the Filter Results window in Directory > Households
* Verify that the person does not already have a pic I might accidentally overwrite
* Click the Edit button of the "Edit | View" pair above the entry
* Use the Change button under the photo in question
* Upload by browsing to the image (rather than drag and drop)

If the picture fails, I resize and it works. Oddly, sometimes pictures under my 900K threshold, fail. Say, one is at maybe 800K but fails anyway. Trying again always fails. Instead, I resize the picture to, say, 700 K. I do that by resampling. If it is, say, 2000 x 2000 pixels, perhaps I'll resample to 1900 x 1900. (I use Photoshop)

--Eben Visher

Eben - When the bulk Upload Photos hasn't worked, the workaround was to do as you mentioned and individually upload pictures. It's more time consuming to upload them that way than in bulk, but when I had to do it, it usually worked. My main problems in the past were with the bulk Upload Photos tab.

You can also upload photos from LCR. I haven't tried that. I guess I'm scared of LCR photos after I had a significant data loss editing photos in LCR. The church told me they made some improvements, but that data loss hurt bad and I'm still scared because they never could reproduce the problem. I was trying to clean up pictures after the church forced the circle mask on all the individual photos and decapitated people in the process. I didn't have originals of some of those, as they were member uploads and some of those were for people we don't see very often, if ever.

I'm guessing the LCR photos uses the same back-end web service as the directory photo upload. Maybe I better get over my fears and give it a try again next time I have to upload photos.

M. (I’ll assume Evans is your last name),

The other day, single picture uploading in the Directory kept failing on pictures that were ok-sized. I switched to LCR for my single-photo uploads (right in the person’s page, upload a picture from my hard disk). That worked wonderfully. So that is one place LCR worked when Directory failed.

Yesterday I wanted to upload from my iPhone X, using Chrome. Nastily, Directory refused to treat me as a “real” web browser. It insisted on giving me the mobile page. Chrome can request that a site treat it as real. That is, it can *explicitly* request the desktop page instead of the mobile page. In what I consider an egregious bug, Directory simply ignores that request.

SO, back to LCR. LCR *accepted* the request to treat my iPhone as a “big boy” and give it the *real* (desktop) page. Great! I knew I was almost there. I used LCR as usual, drilled down to an individual, and uploaded their picture. I did that with several.

To recap: In two different situations, LCR has allowed me to upload individual pictures at times when Directory failed. LCR is my friend.

—Eben Visher, Sacramento, California

M.,

Oops, correction. On my iPhone X, LCR did *not* honor Chrome's request to receive the real website instead of the mobile version. In other words, LCR has the same bug that lds.org has.

The way I talked to LCR, therefore, to see the real, full, LCR pages was.... Wait, why should we/I care, anyway? Answer: The mobile version of LCR omits a *lot* of functionality. So, I used a browser on my iPhone X specifically designed to never get mobile pages. It always tells websites that it is a full browser, not a baby one. The iPhone app I used is, "Browse", at this URL: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/desktop ... 76212?mt=8

Browse is by Spicy Apps. In the "developer name" spot, right under the name of the app (in the App Store app), it gives the author's name as, "Browser".

The point is that ultimately, LCR would upload a given single image when Directory would not. At least on several occasions.

--Eben

EbenVisher wrote:The way I talked to LCR, therefore, to see the real, full, LCR pages was.... Wait, why should we/I care, anyway? Answer: The mobile version of LCR omits a *lot* of functionality.

LCR uses what is called 'responsive' design. It's not really a matter of mobile devices and desktops but rather a matter of screen size. If the browser reports a small screen size then LCR will use the mobile layout. If the browser reports a larger size then it uses the full layout. You can see this by shrinking the window on a desktop version of Chrome. When it get's small enough it switches. The 'mobile' mode doesn't actually change to a different site, it just adjusts the layout of the page. All the same functionality is still there but laid out to fit the smaller size screen. So there really shouldn't be anything that you can do in the 'full' version that can't be done in the 'mobile' mode except see as much information displayed at once. I couldn't find anything missing when I looked (although admittedly some reports are a lot easier to view with more room).

Having said that, on my Android device if I use the 'Desktop Site' option in Chrome it does show the full layout (with everything zoomed way out so it's all really small). I don't know what's different about iPhone Chrome that it works differently.

EbenVisher wrote:The mobile version of LCR omits a *lot* of functionality.

I used to think that about the Help Center. It turns out the options were hidden under a button labeled in a way that didn't help me find it.

Eblood66,

Thanks. That helps. I'm glad to learn that all the same functionality is there.

The issue of no user choice remains, however. Soon I'll upgrade to the iPhone X Plus, with a 6.2" screen instead of my "little" 5.8" one. Then maybe I'll discover that some programmer made the decision that "6.0" inches and less is stuck with Mobile, while > 6" gets "real". So suddenly the whole user experience changes just because I changed my phone.

I LIKE the idea, don't get me wrong. What I DON'T like and think should be fixed, is that *I* and not someone else should decide if I'm happy looking at this site in 4 point text (because I'm viewing it on a little screen). *I* know how good my eyes are, they don't. *I* know how much grief I can stand today as I try to learn an entirely new interface with new widgets and new behavior, they don't know my pain limit.

Regarding the different behavior of different widgets, here's a perfect example:

In the mobile version of LCR now, under Manage Photos, there is a multi-selection box that by default shows, "Individual and Household". I wanted to switch to Individual. I hit the pull-down button at the right side of the widget. This opened a little window docked against the bottom of the screen. It contained a scroller that offered,
Individual and Household
Individual
Household

I scrolled "Individual" into the correct place. NOW WE SEE THE WEIRD WIDGET BEHAVIOR! There was no way to say, "OK, I want this one". Or, "I'm done with this scroller, take me back to the screen." The only choice was to *cancel* (close) the scroller by hitting its "kill" or "close" button in the top right, which was an X. Lo and behold, I finally gave up and hit X since there was no Done or OK. Look what happened! The X was really "Done" in disguise! The choice widget, up above on the screen, now displayed "Individual".

Wow, I sure thought hitting X to mean "Done" was strange (this, from a computer programmer who has actively written software for 50 years; that's why I could take an educated guess to try the "X"). Whether someone else is comfortable with this strange and (to me) unpleasant behavior, misses the point. The point is, *this* multi-choice widget acts *completely* differently from the same-intent multi-choice widget on a big version of the page.

THAT is precisely my complaint.

Simple solution:
Let the user choose.
Keep both mobile and desktop versions...
But again let *me* decide when to switch, not some committee/person who said by fiat, "From now on, 6.0376" and below means Mobile."

Thanks. I hope some of this goes to the right person/people. Maybe I there's a place for posting suggestions, where I could put it?

I love all our Church membership software. I remain in utter *awe* at the hundreds of person-years behind what look like simple interfaces. Thanks, all you who help or build or support. It sure makes my life easier and richer.

--Eben Visher

EbenVisher wrote:I hope some of this goes to the right person/people. Maybe I there's a place for posting suggestions, where I could put it?

The quickest way to send suggestions to the developers is through any of the Website Feedback links, or through any of the App Help links.

lajackson wrote:The quickest way to send suggestions to the developers is through any of the Website Feedback links, or through any of the App Help links.

I would add that you should also be specific about your device, OS and browser and situations which cause problems when and if you submit feedback. On my Android phone using Chrome it works exactly like you want it to. By default it shows the mobile format but when I change the browser to 'Desktop Site' mode it switches to a zoomed out full size layout. All the widgets work the same in both modes as far as I can see. So there are probably quirks about how your device and browser are behaving that would have to be compensated for.

EbenVisher wrote:Eblood66,

The issue of no user choice remains, however. Soon I'll upgrade to the iPhone X Plus, with a 6.2" screen instead of my "little" 5.8" one. Then maybe I'll discover that some programmer made the decision that "6.0" inches and less is stuck with Mobile, while > 6" gets "real". So suddenly the whole user experience changes just because I changed my phone.

One thing that I do sometimes (and it doesn't always work) is to turn my phone to landscape. That makes my screen wider and sometimes gets to a 'better' breakpoint.

Ryan,

Super idea, thanks.

—Eben Visher

I'm resurrecting this thread to ask if anyone else is having issues again. I've looked over responses in this thread. The photo I'm trying to upload is well on the small side, etc. I just can't get anything to upload. I try tools and lds.org. Nothing. Other people have approached me with issues. I could do it for them even though it didn't appear on my end that it had worked. Any suggestions, or does the church just need to update its photo uploading software?

Matt,

I do all my uploading now with LCR. (lcr.churchofjesuschrist.org)

1. Have you tried LCR?

2. In what format is the photo?

3. If you want to send me one that fails, I'd be glad to try uploading it.

4. What error or lack of error do you get?

5. Let me know if I can help you in any other way.

--Eben Visher