XaiJu
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Question for iphone users about HEIC (Feedback request)

We have a possible path that we've found as we took another shot at HEIC (An apple format that has given us difficulty up till now).  We have a way of possibly doing a conversion on upload of an image file which would make it appear as if HEIC works for those uploading from a phone.

The question is...if someone has a NAS, how would they want this handled?  If we do the conversion and a person has say 5000 photos from an iphone, then we'd create 5000 files...on a rapsberry pi which takes almost 2 seconds per file. (This is 2 hours and 47 minutes of processing time which would lock up the pi).

I'm curious of what a user would expect to happen, or desire to happen.  Is having it upload over a phone 'enough' with the understanding that a NAS drive would need to use some third party conversion tools (which would be MUCH faster than the pi, and allow you to control where the files go).

Also, would any users try to copy files over UNC/network paths to the pi? Or again is the file upload good enough?

I've been thinking about it back and forth and realized it's better to just ask and get feedback.   The good news is that we're making progress finally in an area that has kept us pretty stumped for a while now!

Comments

Update, this is checked in and will be fixed in the next builds for file upload only. If you upload a file via the webUI, then it'll be transcoded to jpg on the fly and will 'just work'. The original HEIC file is left but is ignored by the engine. We'll look at feedback on NAS users or uploads to see if further action is needed.

Joe Farro

This is similar to how the original design was. I used to ask users to curate all of the content on the frame, and I didn't even support non 1080p when I first started. Since then its evolved in an effort to do the best it can...1080p images are ideal for it, but if something isn't, then we added features like blurbox, dominant color, stretch etc. to try to do the best we can vs. having the frame look horrible. This is an evolution of that..ideally content would be preprocessed to a format the frame supports, but since I added an upload from phone/web feature, it's caused some stir as a phone may support a format that a pi can't. The next question is ...do I try to support it for NAS. For now I'll do phone upload only and we'll see what patreons say.

Joe Farro

I am a DSLR shooter mainly so my use case and viewpoint is probably a bit different from a native iPhone shooter. Apple does a great job of managing storage of photos taken on the iPhone with uploading/offloading from device to iCloud as a seamless background task. Original images are always backed up to iCloud (in my use case). If I was to upload images to my Dynaframe, then it would a) be a few selected images, not 5,000 b) not be the place I expect original images to be backed up to, I want Dynaframe to be fast, not bloated. I backup all my images to several places, including cloud storage and 2 local NAS's. Any transcoding I would expect to do on my NAS as it is beefy enough to zip through whatever I throw at it and not break a sweat. FOR ME, I would be happy uploading only from Dynaframe, and then have a cron job to do the transcoding on the NAS side.


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