FaceBook ALERT - Photo Album Issue!!!

[cdcollura]

Good day all,

For those using FaceBook ... There is an extremely seriopus problem going on with the photo albums.

If you made a photo album, and PAIN-STAKINGLY put descriptions to your photos, the pictures "mysteriously" may vanish after some time (but the descriptions stay there) - See below...

This BS and also a very time-consuming and frustrating as I happened to stumble across an album and see one or two red "X"'s there (no picture) and had to sift / reload the pictures.

Then, I found another album, with 50 or more pictures ALL GONE ... I am not redoing these and if this is the case, I'll remove my FB albums and leave only my WALL photos there.

Has anyone else seen this ... LOL, maybe you should check some of your albums for those little red "X's" ;-(

This really sucks ... But wait a minute ... I have my own web site (sky-chaser.com), with the SAME pictures over there ... So if FB screws up, who cares?

 

[Keith Slater]

It could just be a temporary outage with one of their image servers.

 

[Nathan Withrow]

Well the other day my status posts, and my profile pic was gone. So I removed my photos, and left up just my profile pics. Facebook is messing up a lot as of late.

 

[Dave Marshall]

Their entire photo front end has long been hailed as a legendary failure in the web design world. The back end is only slightly more reliable and less comical. I haven't seen anything so clumsy and unreliable since about 2003. Ugly as sin to boot.

Java. Seriously? There is absolutely no reason at all that Java should be required to upload photos. If you absolutely must have dynamic content, use flash for the love of God. Lets just have a Wayback party to 2000. You'd think with all those billions of dollars they have, they'd hire someone who could write software that doesn't look like it was assembled by an 8th grader. No, sorry, that's an insult to several middle school aged web designers I know. Anyway. {\rant}

Be careful with what you put on your social networking pages. Facebook's terms are a little more protective of its users, but Myspace was recently caught selling entire user photo albums to the highest bidder with no input from the user. When you post photos on those sites, *most* of them have user agreements that give them full rights to the image to do as they wish. That can cause you a real headache if you ever try to claim copyright infringement.

 

[Jason Foster]

Never had an issue myself...I actually thought their system ran a lot smoother than most. I'd have to see how many folks actually complain about it....but hey if it is working for folks, why change to flash, just because it's newer. If it is broken than is flash the best solution?

 

[Mike Deep]

Java. Seriously? There is absolutely no reason at all that Java should be required to upload photos. If you absolutely must have dynamic content, use flash for the love of God. Lets just have a Wayback party to 2000. You'd think with all those billions of dollars they have, they'd hire someone who could write software that doesn't look like it was assembled by an 8th grader. No, sorry, that's an insult to several middle school aged web designers I know. Anyway. {\rant}

Flash has it's own set of problems, probably worse than Java's. Java is at least an (arguably) open platform with wider support.

I'd say the problem with Facebook's photo frontend is poor design. SmugMug uses a Java uploader that works very well - Drag, drop, upload. Facebook's uploader has a crappy Explorer-esque file browser where you navigate to the correct folder and check off the photos to upload. You can only select a limited amount of photos and then they upload in a separate window that hogs focus and likes to stall out. It also breaks the uploading and verifying processes up into two big chunks, and if one croaks the whole upload batch is hosed (In contrast, SmugMug's Java uploader verifies files one at a time as they are received). Oh, and when it's done, it does a crappy job closing file handles.

 

[cdcollura]

Good day all,

I have no problems with the uploader (java applet). Sometimes it says "upload failed", but retrying it once or twice seems to work.

These are pictures I uploaded last YEAR and added to them, and added the descriptions.

Then, all of a sudden, the descriptions are there, but the pictures don't show (a red "X" appears, as with a broken link or something).

I was suckered into fixing one album (replacing and re-uploading about 7 or 8 pictures), and after that was fixed, I stumbled across the other two albums, missing all the pictures.

The albums were removed, and re-organized with the photos re-uploaded ... Hopefully these changes will "stick"!