Bugs galore

[ftrocchi]

Frustrated with the Eye-Fi app for iPhone. I have the iPhone 4 and both the OS and app are updated.

First, it is S L O W. My Eye-Fi card in my camera is quick and takes just minutes when I am home on my wireless. Why can't the iPhone do the same thing? That said I can tolerate the slowness I guess.

The frustrating thing is I finally get all the photos uploaded recently, and all of the sudden Eye-Fi forgets this. So selecting new photos grabs everything...once again. That with the slowness makes it unbearable.

The other issue is only one out of every 4 or 5 images it tries to send actually goes through. All the others comes back with a very non descriptive "Upload Error". I retry many times and maybe later it actually works.

For me I'm very satisfied with the Eye-Fi card for my camera, and equally unsatisfied with the app for the iPhone. Epic fail.

[berend]

First, it is S L O W. My Eye-Fi card in my camera is quick and takes just minutes when I am home on my wireless. Why can't the iPhone do the same thing? That said I can tolerate the slowness I guess.

That's because when you're home, your card sends the photos directly to your computer (whether that's the only destination or not), but the iPhone application always communicates with the Eye-Fi server and uploads the photos through there, allowing your computer to then fetch the photos from the server. Put differently, the iPhone application is limited by your broadband connection's (or 3G cellular network's) uplink speed.

The other issue is only one out of every 4 or 5 images it tries to send actually goes through. All the others comes back with a very non descriptive "Upload Error". I retry many times and maybe later it actually works.

Could you please post the specific upload error code if one is displayed? Alex may also post here and ask you more specific questions to help understand the problem and address it.

Thanks,

Berend

[alexshepard]

Hi there!

Frustrated with the Eye-Fi app for iPhone. I have the iPhone 4 and both the OS and app are updated.

Ugh, I'm really sorry to hear this. I'm definitely going to do my best to help you out.

First, it is S L O W. My Eye-Fi card in my camera is quick and takes just minutes when I am home on my wireless. Why can't the iPhone do the same thing? That said I can tolerate the slowness I guess.

As Berend mentioned, the iPhone has to route pictures via our servers on the internet, which hurts our speed. Are you on WIFI, 3G or EDGE when you see this slowness? Can you describe what things are slow? Are you frustrated with the speed of the scan for new photos? Or the speed of the actual uploads?

The frustrating thing is I finally get all the photos uploaded recently, and all of the sudden Eye-Fi forgets this. So selecting new photos grabs everything...once again. That with the slowness makes it unbearable.

Currently the batch of "what's new" in the iPhone app only updates when an upload batch successfully finishes. As I mentioned in another thread, the fact that the "Select New" button can select "Previously Uploaded" photos is a bug. It'll be fixed in the next release that goes out.

The other issue is only one out of every 4 or 5 images it tries to send actually goes through. All the others comes back with a very non descriptive "Upload Error". I retry many times and maybe later it actually works.

I think I know what might be happening here. Are you on WIFI, 3G or EDGE when you see these errors? One of the things that we do in the app is break photos and videos up into chunks of data and send those chunks up to our servers. On our servers, your photos get re-assembled into a complete photo or video and then sent on to their final destination (your computer, flickr, etc).

We do this so that we can restart a failed upload halfway through if 50% of the data was already successfully transferred. It also makes things easier on our servers when uploading very large video files over slow internet connections that may take a looooong time to finish uploading.

We've chosen the maximum "chunk" size based on the needs of our servers, but on slower internet connections (such as EDGE or 3G) it may make sense to choose a much smaller chunk size. The speed of the network connection determines how much data we can queue up for sending at a time, and I think what's happening is that on a slow enough connection, we're trying to put too much data into that queue and things generate an error message. The message we get back from the OS is pretty generic, so it's hard to tell for sure, but I think this is what's happening.

I have a theoretical fix for this on my iPhone and will be doing a lot of test uploading on 3G over the weekend to see how it works out. If it looks like it's fixing the actual issue, I'll put another release into Apple's approval queue next week.

For me I'm very satisfied with the Eye-Fi card for my camera, and equally unsatisfied with the app for the iPhone. Epic fail.

Sorry to hear how unsatisfied you are. I hope I can get some fixes into your hands and change your opinion.

Best,
alex

[ftrocchi]

Ok. I understand the issue of sending speed because it doesn't go directly to my PC. That makes sense.

As far as the "upload error", there isn't any message other than that. No error code or anything else descriptive.

I'm glad the "select new" will be fixed. I have a little over a thousand photos on my iPhone, and right now it is trying to send all of them again. Painful.

Thanks for the prompt response to the post.

[alexshepard]

Ok. I understand the issue of sending speed because it doesn't go directly to my PC. That makes sense.

As far as the "upload error", there isn't any message other than that. No error code or anything else descriptive.

I'm glad the "select new" will be fixed. I have a little over a thousand photos on my iPhone, and right now it is trying to send all of them again. Painful.

Thanks for the prompt response to the post.

On Tuesday I submitted the next release of the Eye-Fi iPhone app to Apple for testing. Once they've approved it (fingers crossed) it will be automatically released. This new release has two main features: some new "Select New" behavior, and hopefully some improved uploading behavior. Once it's out, I would love your feedback on how things are working for you.

Thanks much for your patience,
alex