Syncing image files

[rainman]

We currently do extensive home inspections on the ipad with about 100 images, mostly medium sized photos that I want to sync back to the main database. What is your experience iwth image synching? Other prodcuts take way to long to sync.

[ggt667]

How do you store the images?

[bcooney]

I don't think it matters how you store the image (on the host). Moving images is slow. Base64 encoding, as we use for EasySync, does not support Secure External storage.

[Jesse Barnum]

What file size will the images be on average?

When syncing, will users be using cellular data (LTE / 4G / 3G?), wifi over a WAN (what speed?), or wifi on the LAN?

Barbara, I'm not sure why you say that external secure storage cannot be used with base 64 encoding - why wouldn't that work? If it gets put into a container field on the server, wouldn't it just use whatever setting the server is configured with?

[bcooney]

Jesse, From Tims troubleshooting page for EasySync:

Some synced containers are being corrupted. Why?

One possible explanation is that the values in the containers are being stored using FileMaker's "compress" option. There is a known issue with FileMaker's Base64 encoding function, where the function does not first decompress a container's contents prior to encoding. To avoid this problem, do not use compressed containers.

Note: This issue also applies to secure, external containers. FileMaker is not decrypting the containers before Base64 encoding them. As a result, decoding those values returns incorrect values.

And this thread : http://fmforums.com/forum/topic/94723-container-fields/

[Jesse Barnum]

Hi Barbara - I did see the problem you're talking about when using compressed files, but I did not see the problem with secure external storage (unless they happened to also be compressed).

 

In MirrorSync, you can set the $$base64Limit global variable to zero to force MirrorSync to transfer container data as a guest of FileMaker server instead of using Base64. That solves the problem of syncing compressed files.

[bcooney]

"secure external storage (unless they happened to also be compressed)"

 

http://timdietrich.me/blog/compress-secure-external-container-issues/

 

and

 

http://forums.filemaker.com/posts/7eeabe3c2a

[Jesse Barnum]

@rainman - I'm still waiting for an answer on the questions I sent you. If you can give me some answers on those, I'll try to set up some testing benchmarks here to give you an idea of what to expect for sync performance.