Snapfish Inanity

I'm more of a snapfish consumer than producer (no kids), but I just uploaded 240 pictures from a road trip. I tried to do this on my mac, but if you are on a mac, you have to use an html form with 10 file fields and browse for the files one at a time, and there's no progress bar. On a PC, they let you use a flash uploader. So I booted up my PC into windows just for this and decided to use their "Picture Mover" application. Apparently, the snapfish programmers haven't heard of threads.

When I plugged in the camera, it took about thirty minutes for it to find all the photos. In that time, the interface was unresponsive (couldn't scroll, didn't redraw itself). It also had them in order by filename, not by date. And it didn't respect the rotation that is stored in the files. I figured that when I uploaded them, snapfish would make it right, so I clicked "move now". It copied all 240 to my PC (what was it doing during the first 30 minutes???), then started uploading. The first two took over an hour. I expected it to upload more than one at a time, but it looked to be going in order. For kicks, I left it on and went to sleep.

I couldn't believe it, but in the morning it was done. I went to the snapfish site and they were still in the wrong order and orientation. The rotating interface was actually kind of nice and worked well, but the rearranging interface is a nightmare. They present all photos in the album with a text entry box next to each photo with a number in it. Then they tell you to change the numbers to the order you want them in. This is nontrivial for 240 pictures. I started doing some sort of insertion sort. After you click rearrange, it of course takes you back to the album page and you have to click edit, rearrange, wait for a page load, then start doing some renumbering. Another tactic I tried was moving ones that were interrupting the order to the end by giving them numbers greater than 250 (this way I didn't have to renumber both the source and the destination).

Anyway, I've made it halfway and it's a complete mess. I'm thinking of doing bubble sort for the remaining 120...