Piclens from Cooliris.com

[alexis]

Can we kindly have an update on PicLens implementation?

[djwixx]

Can we kindly have an update on PicLens implementation?

Do we need a day by day update request? We know it's on the list and I'm sure we'll get told when it's done, if it gets done.

[unavailable]

Wrong forum, there is a special forum for feature requests.

And overall, please, make PBase work correctly at simple low level before adding any feature like Piclens, printing, and others.
Working on the bad problems is maybe what is wrong first with PBase.

[nooutlet]

Just to let you know, I haven't forgotten about PicLens. We're still making adjustments to the printing page and I've still been making PicLens work in a feeds system that we've had for awhile. I've also been adding PicLens to the options page in account settings.

To unavailable:
Others have reported that PBase is working smoothly, so that suggests that the problem isn't local to PBase, but instead is en route from PBase to your computer.
Also, programming new features isn't slowing the process of fixing any hardware issues that PBase does have when it does have them.

[dang]

nooutlet wrote:

Others have reported that PBase is working smoothly, so that suggests that the problem isn't local to PBase, but instead is en route from PBase to your computer.

Thanks for the update, and after beginning to check tracerout more often, I have to agree. Can't speak for other areas, but around Atlanta net speed hasn't been the same in the last several weeks for me. Not sure exactly why, but since AT&Pee took over BellSouth I've had ongoing problems. Today I've had to reboot my modem (which I replaced two weeks ago) each time I've shut down awhile, even though it's lights show connection. I've never had such consistent problems since I've been on the net.

[unavailable]

To nooutlet,

In this forum, you can read pages and pages (tens of pages ?) of people complaining about the problems they have with PBase (simple access slow or impossible to forum, profile, stats, upload, download, comments..., all changing from one week to another). And they come from everywhere in the world. There is no mondial conspiration against access to PBase. Is there ?

Anyway, I post now on three other photo sites (one in Japan), and there is no such problem.

[nooutlet]

I'm not suggesting any consipiracy. I experienced slow down and broken thumbnails a few weeks ago and indeed, the forums were abuzz with reports of that. Now, the buzz has noticeably subsided to a few people. I'm not saying PBase never has problems and all reports are lying. I haven't got my fingers in my ears here. I'm concerned about your PBase experience and the PBase experience of others. I don't fix the hardware personally, but I do manage and visit the forums quite regularly and I don't like seeing "I hate to do it, but I'm leaving PBase because they obviously don't care. TOO SLOW" or something like that when I can't see the problem and others don't have the problem, so it's likely some hop along the way to us as opposed to something we can fix(without a relocation, I suppose).
It doesn't matter how many people nor even how many countries report the slowness, if 3 people in different parts of the world report a distinct lack of slowness, that is heavy evidence that the problem is not on the local PBase hardware. Remember, we're not likely to get too many people on the forum that are there to post "Hey PBase guys. Just wanted to say that the connection speed here is very similar to the connection speeds I experience at other sites! Keep up the good work!" Those who aren't having problems are either not visiting the forum at all or they are having a good time in the Show & Tell Forum or the PAD Discussion Forum or some other forum. The reports of lack of slowness have come from people that enjoy coming on the Questions and Answers Forum and helping those that have questions about general PBase functionality. They've seen a lot of people complaining about slowness that they aren't experiencing and that's why they're reporting normal conditions.
And I'm sure you know that photo sites(especially those in Japan) are not going to have the same route to you as PBase. They'll have their own routes which may or may not be slow at any given time.
Anyway, this topic may have been in the wrong forum, but this discussion is completely off-topic. You can respond to this in one of the "PBase is slow" threads.
Denmark, Singapore, Canada, Australia, Within miles of PBase servers.... In addition to these posts reporting a lack of connectivity issues, there has been a lot of variance about the specific action that is being slow. Some people are reporting slowness in upload but normal speed in browsing and some are reporting the exact opposite.

[unavailable]

Nooutlet, thanks for your time and relatively complete response.
I suggest to Luc_VN to post his question in the correct forum, and to you to close this discussion here. Luc, tu pourrais bien faire cela.
This discussion was in-topic as far as the problem could come from too much PBase work oriented to printing, Cooliris, and other (relatively useless) features, and not enough to basic functions.

[zevs]

Just to let you know, I haven't forgotten about PicLens. We're still making adjustments to the printing page and I've still been making PicLens work in a feeds system that we've had for awhile. I've also been adding PicLens to the options page in account settings.

To come back to the original topic of this thread, what is causing PBase to be s o o o o o o slow in implementing this fantastic viewing option when clearly other picture sites seems not to be to have any problems with it ? Is PBase diffeent from these making the implementation more difficult, or is the competence at PBase lower than that of development teams at other photo sites, or what is the reason for this delay ?? I think it is about 6 months now since the request for PicLens first appeared in these forums.

Zevs

[nooutlet]

First of all, some more popular photo sites were enabled by PicLens interpreting the page instead of the site creating a feed for PicLens to read. Flickr is owned by Yahoo and PicLens uses a Yahoo Media RSS feed, so Flickr probably didn't have too much trouble getting one set up, did they? Even still, I've had PicLens act strangely on Flickr and SmugMug.
Certainly, PicLens isn't so tough to enable that the wait has been all about that though. Part of it was that the pages on the development servers are updated as part of a major overhaul of all of PBase. So when I made it work, I made it work for the new version which isn't ready to release to you guys yet. Another thing is that we weren't sure we wanted to enable PicLens for technical reasons. If you have PicLens installed on your browser while browsing a site with a PicLens RSS feed available, your browser will be made to read not just the feed, but every thumbnail in the feed(in order to match it with the thumbnails on the page and display the "Go" arrow over the thumbnail) whether or not you actually use PicLens on that site. If the gallery has 10 pages of thumbnails and you browse it page by page, each time you change the page, the feed gets read and each thumbnail gets read twice. That could mean a substantial increase in the number of requests from viewers with PicLens installed. I created a work around that reduces that increase to two requests when PicLens changed the symbol on the browser from a static icon to an icon that turns from gray to blue when there is a feed to read.
There was also a bit of discussion about whether enabling PicLens should be a choice that the gallery owner makes and whether it should be opt in or opt out.
Lastly, I'm the one working on PicLens. I've also been working on the page for setting up printing of images without frames, working on getting these forums up and managing to keep them up and extracting EXIF for all the different types of cameras with different ways of filling in metadata. Some other sites have larger development teams from what I understand, but the delay has not been because it's all that difficult to set up.

In looking up how SmugMug was doing with their PicLens implementation, I found it painfully slow to navigate. Also, they don't seem to have it enabled on Popular Photos or things like that. I've set it up on our Popular Photos, Recent Updates, etc(not Random for technical reasons) in addition to Galleries and also I've set it up so that the thumbnail of sub-galleries has a "Go" button which takes you into PicLens in that sub-gallery.
I guess my answer is that we're a bit busy with main parts of our site so enabling third party enhancements is low on the list and when we do enable it, we want it to be the best implementation we can make without hurting server performance.

[dougj]

Thanks for the update Nooutlet - I prefer the team work on the overall site updates and basic features, IMHO Piclens is secondary. Multiple simultaneous projects means the completion of anything gets delayed.

[zevs]

Thanks very much for the info Nooutlet!

Glad from what you say that it seems not that hard to implement PicLens really, even if there are some tricky decisions to be made on how to handle different situations. Hopefully you have got enough answers from us PBase users that you have made decisions on most of these things though. Sounds like the delay for PBase to implement PicLens is more a matter of the time you can spend on this in competition with the printing and exif stuff. From my point of view PBase is >90 % about being able to showcase one's pictures in as good way as possible. That is why many users have changed the look of their "sites" by using CSS and also added slideshows (which is not so easy any more of course). All to give a good and personal feel and look to how one's pictures are presented. PicLens is definitively an improvement in the way of presenting ones pics, one gets a feeling of walking along the walls in a museum, very cool and innovative!

When it comes to printing pics through PBase, I don't really see the point of that. I went and looked at the options a year or more ago and found it not attractive, due partly to what I thought was a high price (partly depending on the shipping cost since I live in Europe). There seems always to be a number of local places that can do good prints for you and where you also more easily can talk to the people if something goes wrong. Also, at least I don't put up print quality pics on PBase, since they get to be too large and thus eat up my account. Instead I use Photoshop to make smaller pics that are saved in a format for the Web. So to me the printing facility is not a high priority development, and I wonder how many PBase users really use this facility (I put up a Poll in the Forum to get a better idea on that).

Work on transferring EXIF information to PBase, yes for sure that can be useful in some cases. But I must say I very seldom look at that information, I look at and enjoy the pictures in the galleries and if I find something that I for some reason need to find out what camera was used or what speed or ISO I can always ask the photographer about that. To me the attractiveness of a picture, is mostly related to the photographer's way of viewing and capturing the world, and not so much to which camera that was used or the exact shooting details. In my own case I do save my files from Photoshop's Save for Web option before uploading them to PBase, something that discards the EXIF info in the process.

So, for me, and of course that is only my personal view, implementation of PicLens would give me as a frequent PBase user much higher value than either the printing or EXIF stuff. Very likely other people have different views on this, but perhaps there are also some with the same view as I, i.e. that the important part of PBase is the viewing of the pictures.

Zevs

[nooutlet]

I have a similar view as you, actually. If you look hard enough, you'll find a post where I say that EXIF isn't important to me. I got akmc_in_au quite a bit annoyed by that remark because he took it that it's not important to PBase, but I meant it the way that you've said it. I can't really say that the printing option is even applicable to me since I'm not an artistic photographer right now, so I'm not interested in printing either through PBase or on my own.
However, while PicLens may feel great for you, some artists won't want people to see their galleries that way without their permission because they didn't design their CSS and go through so much trouble to have their gallery displayed in a large wall of 3 rows. Another thing to consider are the viewcounts. Essentially, with PicLens enabled, viewcounts will likely suffer because viewers won't have to go to a particular page to see a full image. There are a good many pros AND cons to Piclens implementation for PBase and it's visitors.
Actually, there has also been a little confusion as to the most reliable method of getting the image url from the database because there are a few outdated tables in the database. Anyway, it'll be nice when it all gets ironed out, I'm sure.

[flemmingbo]

I agree very much with Nooutlet here and can I just add that maybe Pbase should hold off on enabling Piclens until the infrastructure hardware so the current overload situation is solved. Maybe you don't wanna put even more strain on the servers until there's is enough capacity to support Piclens.

regards,

Flemming

[zevs]

Thanks again Nooutlet for your reply! Glad we very much share the same view about some of this stuff. In relation to the printing facility, I have not got one single response yet on my poll, so the interest among PBase users for this must not be very high. The fact that the forum created for discussing this feature only contains ~85 threads since the first one appeared in Nov 2006, also points in the same direction. So perhaps it could be a good time to discuss priorities with Slug and Emily and others at PBase ... discussing if getting the site PicLens compatible might have a higher priority ... Perhaps too much to hope for, but still one needs hope

I agree with you that some PBase users might not want their sites to be viewed in the PicLens format, due to that they put in a lot of effort to get their photo presentations exactly as they want them. But that is not really a problem if each user (as been discussed here before) will have the option to allow PicLens viewing or not on their "site". The view counts is a fun thing, one does like to see those numbers go up for sure But still, how important is this really... If you as a user think this is an important feature for you, then you would just choose not to activate PicLens. So I really hope that we who wants to view our own and other's pictures in the fantastic way that PicLens offers, will soon be able to do it.

I agree very much with Nooutlet here and can I just add that maybe Pbase should hold off on enabling Piclens until the infrastructure hardware so the current overload situation is solved. Maybe you don't wanna put even more strain on the servers until there's is enough capacity to support Piclens.

Flemming

So I must say I really don't agree with Fleming's conclusions. I know many people complain about capacity problems and slowness, but to my mind PBase usually works very well without any problems at all. I have been a user since July 2003 (and have > 14 000 pics online) and it has perhaps happend 3-5 times during that time that there has been really serious issues making it difficult or impossible to use PBase. Very frustrating at those times for sure, but as I said all in all, one a more or less daily use basis, I find PBase works very well. The problems that we have had some times in the past, was if I remember right partly due what seemed to be a non-communication policy of the PBase staff (you are a clear exception to that Nooutlet !!). One should also differentiate between maintenance work and development work, maintenance work is of course very, very important to ensure stability, speed and reliability, but when it comes to development of new features, I know where I have my sight set

Zevs