Flickr links

[Jordan]

OK guys, I have been working on this for the past week, and I might have it solved. I say "might" because, from a technical perspective, this is an extremely difficult issue to pin down. There are many factors involved, but I do have a better understanding of the problem now and why my previous fixes were not permanent.

I reprogrammed all the edge cache servers so they should not cache the broken image placeholders and will attempt to re-fetch the image from the origin server. So, when Flickr or Imgur or whatever has an issue, that single failure should not continue to haunt us here.

@torque99 and @BLiTZ, please have a look through your threads and let me know if you see more missing images. If so, please do give the page a refresh before reporting back here. Also, please provide links to the specific posts where you see the problem. Thanks for your help in nailing this down.

 

[torque99]

Hi @Jordan Thanks for looking in to this. I'm afraid some are still there, others have worked.

I chose 3 random threads and these latest pages (my flickr posts) (after clearing cache/history and Pressing F5 multiple time) still show lots of red crosses on varies chrome devices. Any ideas? 💡 👍

https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/onrush™-photo-mode-thread.378206/page-6 (i.e Post #158 is not showing any photos) etc
https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/batman™_-arkham-knight-photo-thread.377173/ (post #6, 7 , 8 , 9 all red crosses)
https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/god-of-war-photo-mode-thread.377646/ (post #28+#29 red crosses)


Edit @Jordan please note these photos/threads were added before you did all the latest adjustments if this helps.

 

[Jordan]

Hmm, well, that's frustrating.

It looks like those images were failing for slightly different reasons than the GT Sport shots. I've modified the cache servers again and all of the images in those three threads are now loading for me.

How do they look on your end?

 

[torque99]

Hmm, well, that's frustrating.

It looks like those images were failing for slightly different reasons than the GT Sport shots. I've modified the cache servers again and all of the images in those three threads are now loading for me.

How do they look on your end?

At first the same, but I cleared cache/history in Chrome settings and these all work perfectly now on all devices which I tested.

Well done.👍 Do you think you have got to the bottom of this cache mystery or will it be ongoing?

 

[Jordan]

Good to hear, and yes, I should have mentioned that you need to clear your own browser cache or do a hard-refresh.

I don't want to jinx it, but yes, this should be a permanent fix. I can imagine some edge cases where it could still fail, but it's not really something I can design around right now (and it might not be necessary at all).

You may also want to keep an eye on the size of the images you're embedding. While looking through the pages in your threads (fortunately you're a talented photographer, because I've had to look at your pictures a lot! ), I noticed some of the pages were extremely large. One page had over 182 high-resolution images and loaded over 250MB of data. With an empty cache, it took over 20 seconds to load on my MacBook Pro with a 100Mbps Internet connection. Just looking at a few of your threads on my phone would have chewed up 25% of my own personal mobile data plan.

This is one of the reasons that I've implemented our new caching system. Now that it's working properly, it automatically compressed that page down to 50MB (though that is still quite large). It loaded in less than 2 seconds, and it will dynamically serve images which are further optimized to visitors on mobile devices.

Features like that help a lot, but in the future, do consider embedding images with smaller dimensions if you know you're going to be putting a lot of them together in one thread. The overwhelming majority (almost 70%) of everyone who visits GTPlanet is doing so on a mobile device, so they won't be able to appreciate all those extra pixels, anyway.

 

[torque99]

Thanks for your kind words @Jordan

Over the past few years I kept all my photos low px and I tried telling others to reduce the sizes for the pages to load only to get bitten back lots of times, so I gave up in the end!

The maximum I embed recently is 800-1024-1600px max (odd few at 2K testing this problem to solve) as links and it seemed to load very quick these sizes (after many trials of all sizes and shapes including uploads) to help the pages load, any larger and it slows down.

I did a test a few months back and all other sizes smaller and below seemed low quality, blurry and not clear. Good tip though, and I never realised 70% were on mobile! I assumed most here were tablet or Desktops on Wifi. So I will consider this from now on.

In some threads most are uploading 4K photos (GT Sport etc) and this slows down for me as well so I hope this auto compress facility will come in useful.

I always thought mobile devices compressed photo previews small on the size of screen so they were not so much data to preview but more if you clicked the photo links but you learn something new everyday! I must be using up more data than I thought on 4G!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I would prefer to upload direct on your GTP Uploader system, but they seem very low quality and blurry compared to any links I embed.

Is there a way you can make them/thumbnails any sharper? 👍 I would for sure use this facility, as it auto sizes them to 800px and so much quicker than copying BB codes!


4K flickr BB code 800 px Link Photo

GTP uploaded 4K photo

The differences in quality between the images show more on Desktop or 4K monitor. Cell/mobiles and Tablets the difference is minimal. 👍

 

[Pupik]

Flickr is quite generous with their free one-terabyte plan and willingness to hotlink; but on random occasions, they're also quite flaky for showing images, searching, or uploading.

It's not just GTP, but for other boards as well.

 

[Jordan]

I always thought mobile devices compressed photo previews small on the size of screen so they were not so much data to preview but more if you clicked the photo links but you learn something new everyday! I must be using up more data than I thought on 4G!

Yeah, that's only the case if you embed the thumbnail. If you embed the full-size image and allow it to be resized directly on the page by the JavaScript, all of its data will be downloaded anyway.

I would prefer to upload direct on your GTP Uploader system, but they seem very low quality and blurry compared to any links I embed.

Is there a way you can make them/thumbnails any sharper? 👍 I would for sure use this facility, as it auto sizes them to 800px and so much quicker than copying BB codes!

Sure, I've bumped the quality from 85% to 95%. Here's what your Civic picture looks like with the new quality levels.

It's still not quite Flickr quality, but it is better than before (images uploaded before this date will not be recompressed). I don't have Flickr's resources (or their budget), so I can't afford to host all of these image files at their full resolution with low/no compression.

Flickr is quite generous with their free one-terabyte plan and willingness to hotlink; but on random occasions, they're also quite flaky for showing images, searching, or uploading.

It's not just GTP, but for other boards as well.

Yeah, Flickr has caused a lot of headaches for forum owners recently, especially others using caching services like Cloudflare. Once I'm confident in our configuration here I'm going to share my solution and code with them, so hopefully what we've learned here can help other sites as well.

 

[torque99]

Thank you very much @Jordan I really appreciate all this work that you are doing to help out. This is why is such a great site.

Hopefully we have got to the bottom of it all with flickr links now.

That new upload photo looks fantastic and a much improved quality @95%

I think after learning all this about the data and loading and helping others on this site, from now on I will upload any photos with the upload facility and then put a text link to the original 4K on flickr if required (best of both worlds) 👍

Thanks again

 

[GBO Possum]

@Jordan, I'm seeing lots of red crosses instead of photos in this thread. Using Safari on iPad Pro and MacBook Pro

https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/assassins-creed®-origins-photo-mode-thread.372679/

 

[torque99]

@Jordan, I'm seeing lots of red crosses instead of photos in this thread. Using Safari on iPad Pro and MacBook Pro

https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/assassins-creed®-origins-photo-mode-thread.372679/

Apologies, This Assassins Creed thread is my fault !!! I forgot about these! It was when I was testing another host thinking my Flickr links were bad the other month but the site wasn't easy to use and forgot to copy the flickr links back!

Here are the originals >>> https://www.flickr.com/photos/156584155@N08/albums/72157665604691957

Edit: Update I have swapped to upload files ^^^^^ 👍 all the bad links now

This shouldn't happen from the last week or so since I have been using GTP uploader but it is ongoing when I come across them as I have all the files ready to upload on PC 👍

 

[Moglet]

It's still not quite Flickr quality, but it is better than before (images uploaded before this date will not be recompressed). I don't have Flickr's resources (or their budget), so I can't afford to host all of these image files at their full resolution with low/no compression.

From what I can make out Flickr applies a sharpening filter to thumbnail images, something I haven't seen with other hosting services, so it's not just down to compression.

 

[ImaRobot]

From what I can make out Flickr applies a sharpening filter to thumbnail images, something I haven't seen with other hosting services, so it's not just down to compression.

I'm not so sure they do, to be honest. Mine seem to look identical straight from the source compared to Flickr. However, I think what you're noticing is that when an image is seen at a smaller resolution compared to it's original state, it seems sharper than usual, which is a normal occurrence.

 

[Moglet]

I'm not so sure they do, to be honest. Mine seem to look identical straight from the source compared to Flickr. However, I think what you're noticing is that when an image is seen at a smaller resolution compared to it's original state, it seems sharper than usual, which is a normal occurrence.

Their resizing definitely includes something that sharpens the image more than Photoshop, Lightroom, Imgur, Imageshack or any other hosting site. You can see the difference clearly in the GT Sport photomode contest entry threads by looking at the sharpness of the GT logo in the corner. It might not necessarily have a specific sharpening filter as such (that was bad wording on my part really) but their resizing method is different to anything else I've ever used.

For example, the images below are hosted on different websites. The resizing on the Imageshack one was done in Photoshop (source was a 1080p image without any sharpening applied to ensure I complied with the photo contest rules).

The Flickr one was resized automatically by using the smaller size link. The source image was the same.

This only applies to resized images, full size ones aren't affected.

Imageshack:

Flickr:

 

[ImaRobot]

Their resizing definitely includes something that sharpens the image more than Photoshop, Lightroom, Imgur, Imageshack or any other hosting site. You can see the difference clearly in the GT Sport photomode contest entry threads by looking at the sharpness of the GT logo in the corner. It might not necessarily have a specific sharpening filter as such (that was bad wording on my part really) but their resizing method is different to anything else I've ever used.

For example, the images below are hosted on different websites. The resizing on the Imageshack one was done in Photoshop (source was a 1080p image without any sharpening applied to ensure I complied with the photo contest rules).

The Flickr one was resized automatically by using the smaller size link. The source image was the same.

This only applies to resized images, full size ones aren't affected.

That's an interesting bit of information. I wasn't aware of it until you pointed it out, to be honest and I always figured it was just compression difference, but from what I can see, there really isn't any compression in the Imageshack image compared to the source image for my images I was comparing.

I wonder if that's just a bit of false advertisement on FlickR's front Making the image quality appear slightly better than the competition because of a small filter of some sort applied to it.

On a side note, that extra clarity can make an image standout a bit more in comparison, with these contest. Not really something you can restrict though, to be honest.

 

[BLiTZ]

@Jordan I still seem to be getting this issue in this thread: https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/thre...-update-gt-r-lm-limited-gallery.368836/page-2

I've just gone to add a new post and half the images have disappeared again. I've cleared the cache and refreshed but the links still appear broken.

 

[Jordan]

@Jordan I still seem to be getting this issue in this thread: https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/thre...-update-gt-r-lm-limited-gallery.368836/page-2

I've just gone to add a new post and half the images have disappeared again. I've cleared the cache and refreshed but the links still appear broken.

Hmm, can you double check this?

All of the images appear in the thread for me, even with an empty cache / hard refresh, viewed both from the U.S. and via the UK edge cache.

 

[BLiTZ]

Hmm, can you double check this?

All of the images appear in the thread for me, even with an empty cache / hard refresh, viewed both from the U.S. and via the UK edge cache.

Yeah, after three cache deletes and multiple refreshes I managed to get them to show. Weird as both my Laptop and phone showed multiple broken links before I posted back in this thread?!