How fast can event photos go online? Previews first, originals after

After an event, the question everyone asks is "when will the photos be up?" For participants, it's about seeing themselves while the day is still fresh. For whoever runs the gallery, it's about sales and free downloads: in our experience, the sooner a gallery is live, the more people look at it. This article explains what decides how long a gallery takes to go online, and how to make it minutes rather than hours.

What decides the time

Four things set the pace of an upload:

1. How many photos. A club 5K might produce a few hundred. A big-city race can produce tens of thousands.
2. How big each file is. Event JPEGs are often around 10 MB each. Ten thousand of them is roughly 100 GB.
3. Your upload speed. This is usually the limit. Many connections upload far slower than they download, and venue connections can be slower still.
4. How well the upload uses the connection. Sending one or two files at a time leaves most of a connection idle. Sending many at once, and adjusting as conditions change, uses it fully.

Multiply it out and the problem is clear. Sending 100 GB of originals over a modest upload takes hours, however good the software is. That's the case for sending something smaller first.

Previews first: go live before the originals finish

With previews first, the Photohawk web uploader sends a small preview of every photo before the originals. The previews are a fraction of the size, so they go up quickly, even on a slow connection at the venue. The gallery can go live on those previews while the originals carry on in the background.

On every plan, a 10,000-photo gallery can be live and selling in about 8 minutes on a 20 Mbps upload. The originals keep uploading into the same photos.

Here's what that means for the people looking at the gallery:

• They can browse straight away. The previews are what buyers see in any gallery anyway: watermarked, and protected if the gallery uses preview protection.
• They can find themselves straight away. Bib numbers and faces are found on the previews, so search works as soon as the gallery is live.
• They always get the original. A purchase or a free download is never the preview. If someone buys or downloads a photo before its original has arrived, that original jumps the queue and goes up next.

The step-by-step version is on how preview-first uploads work.

Estimate your own time

The web uploader page has an estimator: enter the number of photos, the average file size and your upload speed (or test it), and it shows how long the gallery takes to go live with previews first and how long all the originals take. Estimates depend on your connection, your computer and your photos, so treat them as a guide.

A rough rule: the gallery-live time with previews first is set mostly by the number of photos; the all-originals time is set mostly by total size divided by upload speed.

Practical ways to go live sooner

• Upload from the venue. Even a mobile connection is enough to get the previews up.
• Cull lightly. Remove blinks and empty frames; don't spend an hour grading.
• Upload in priority order. The finish first, then the busiest points on the course. Upload order still decides what's searchable first.
• Publish automatically. Tick "Publish the gallery as soon as the previews are up" and the gallery goes live on its own.
• Keep the uploader open until the originals finish, so buyers waiting for an original don't wait long. If you have to close it, nothing is lost: add the same folder again later and only the missing originals are sent.
• Watch the status strip. It shows whether the gallery is live, how many originals are left and how many people are visiting.

What about FTP?

FTP apps send files one after another, a few at a time: FileZilla (2 at a time by default, and no more than 10). There's no previews-first step, so the gallery waits for originals. Photos sent by FTP or from Photohawk Studio upload as originals in one go. If FTP is essential to your workflow, you can still use it with your own on-demand FTP server, on every plan, but for speed the web uploader is the better choice. We compare the two in web uploader vs FTP.

Big events and teams

On a large event with several people shooting, give each person their own folder so uploads run side by side without anyone overwriting anyone else. Our article on workflows for multi-photographer teams goes through it. The web uploader is built for events of more than 100,000 photos and picks up where it left off if the connection drops.

Try it

Previews first is in the web uploader on every plan. Add your next event's folder, choose "Previews first, originals later", and watch the gallery go live. New to Photohawk? Create a free Studio account.