Sat Feb 16, 2008 7:21 am PBase would use the paths to automatically create the associated gallery structure. This can save a user many hours of tedium when creating and uploading large, complex hierarchical gallery structures.
PBase's upload features have been requested or discussed recently and in the past, too. I think it's all about process. It's important to step back and look at the big picture. What problem are we really trying to solve here? What are the user's basic requirements for creating and maintaining an on-line photo database? Where's the bottleneck? That's the hard part. Implementing the solution in a website is straightforward enough these days, I think.
As far as my own process (which many others use, no doubt)....I think it's most practical if an online database mirrors a local one. This applies to any data whether it's imagery, audio, text files, whatever. So I maintain a master database on my local drive. It's a hierarchy of hundreds of subfolders, several levels deep (ie, Trips/Europe 2005/France/Paris/pics). My PBase account is merely a copy of that. This makes it easy to manage.
Ideally I could create a new gallery structure by merely hitting a button and pointing PBase to the local root folder. Or refresh an old gallery similarly. PBase would do the rest.
Unfortunately, life with PBase isn't so simple. We must painstakingly create each gallery manually. Then create a zip file of the corresponding folder of our local database. Then upload this zip file and wait till it's complete. Then back up and create the next gallery, etc. This process is made even more tedious by the often slow speed of the site. It can take hours of work just to upload galleries from just one trip. The bottleneck isn't so much one's upload data rate as it is all the steps involved. The clicking, typing, waiting for the site to respond, etc. The seconds nickel and dime you into wasting hours.
At the moment I need to upload around 2000 photos from a recent trip. These exist in a hierarchy of around 100 subfolders, several levels deep. I'm looking at many hours of tedious work to manually recreate this on PBase.
I'm aware that there exists a stand-alone 3rd party upload utility for Windows. But it doesn't support hierarchical structures. PBase is awesome in so many ways so I'd hate to have to abandon it for another site.
Does anyone think this feature will ever be added? Could the site managers have deliberately (or inadvertently) created a disincentive for uploading huge photo databases? Perhaps if users could do that with the touch of a button PBases's servers could quickly fill to capacity? Certainly the more painful it is to upload galleries the less money the site ultimately has to spend on servers. Which benefits everybody, cost-wise, I guess.
Suggestions or work-arounds? Yes I know, maybe people like myself shouldn't upload so many darn pics.
- Chris
