Facebook: Building a Better Photo Uploader | Hacker News Reader

Facebook: Building a Better Photo Uploader

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35 pointslordgilman14 comments

About bloody time! I'm amazed it's taken them this long to do something about that awful photo uploader, when photos are surely one of their killer apps. The number of (unanswered) complaints on their forum about this issue must run into tens of thousands.

But did it seriously require a complete rewrite instead of just fixing that woefully buggy Java applet? And could they really not have achieved this new implementation with Gears or YBP? They're rather vague on what was missing from those plugins, and I remember Google stating that they supported decent file upload functionality (including drag and drop) just fine.

Facebook couldn't fix it because they just licensed the old Java/ActiveX uploader from a company named Aurigma. Even though Aurigma would give you the source if you paid them enough, you didn't get any ownership over it. When Facebook first started, it was probably the right choice for them, because photo uploading wasn't their focus, but now that they are huge, the improved ability to iterate the design is probably worth it.

Remember that they have to resize the picture files before uploading them to the Haystack. That's computation you want to push as much to the client side as possible.

My guess is the preview. Other plugins seem less concern about preview files.

interesting. i use a mac. do other operating systems not show previews while browsing for files?

Interesting approach. They have built a UI-less browser plugin that exposes new javascript API to your web app.

That gets me thinking about other possible browser plugins along those lines: - Expose the native filesystem - Fire an event when a USB device is connected - Or when email is received ...

I have a working browser plugin that allows justin.tv to access and respond to the Apple Remote Control. I should really find time to get it polished and released...

NPAPI plugins are actually pretty good fun to write.

You're thinking of ActiveX.

Not just a plugin, but a plugin that runs a local webserver ...

The photo uploader on facebook has always been lame, taking ages to load and often crashing. It's a classic case of over-engineering. I've always ended up using the simplified uploader, which is much more straightforward.

Why did they decide to have it use the modal window? I can't see a full two rows of photos.

But that's cheating...

I thought the same thing actually. If you're going to make a plugin then it might as well be a full-blown app. I thought this post was going to be about a better uploader made in JS/HTML5 or something. Dropbox has a very good uploader. Now that Facebook runs the entire site on Ajax, they could relatively easily make a Flash/JS uploader like Dropbox while making sure the user can surf around the site.

The photo uploader is the first step towards them taking over the browser completely. They will trick users into using this and start dark testing new features, over time they will replace the majority of the browser's built-in rendering engine.

Nothing like being able to execute arbitrary x86 code through the browser....

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