3 Notes
about the picplz pic posting pipeline
The point of picplz is make uploading a pic dead simple. As a user, you shouldn’t really have to worry too much about what goes on behind the scenes in order to get your pic off your phone.
However, several users have noticed that there can be significant delays before the picture shows up, and rather than try to explain it in 140 characters on twitter, we are going to go into a little more detail.
picplz’s pic posting pipeline:
- When you take a pic, we write the pic to the SD card on your phone so that it won’t get lost getting uploaded.
- The picplz app immediately tries to upload over your phone’s data connection
- If you are connected over WiFi or a fast 3G connection, then it usually is uploaded in a few seconds
- If the first upload try fails, we wait a little while and then try to upload again. We have tweaked the amount of time that it waits before trying again and this is likely something we will keep tweaking. (It’s a delicate balance— if we try again too much, it can cause battery drain, if we don’t try often enough, users experience delay.)
- Once your pic is successfully uploaded to picplz, we then can post notifications to services you are linked to.
- Sometimes Twitter and/or Foursquare are not functioning properly, so we can’t post the tweet/checkin. In this case, we take note that the action failed and try again after a few minutes. If that also fails, we keep trying.
As you can see, there are several moving pieces that can affect how long a pic upload might take. In a worse case scenario several things can happen while uploading the same pic.
The picplz team is continuing to work on the speed and reliability of uploads. There is a lot we can do to improve our software. And now that we have a lot of users testing our picplz, we have a much better idea of how things can go wrong.
Please keep the feedback coming, we are listening!
