Uploading of photos does not seem to work reliably

[Florian Boucault]

Pardon the unclarity in advance but there seems to be a few issues mingled into this one.

At first run of the app, I was asked if I wanted my photo roll to be synchronised automatically on Ubuntu One to which I answered yes.
Issue 1: I was expecting my already taken photos to be queued for upload, but upload queue stayed empty.
Issue 2: I then went into the camera and took a new picture expecting to be uploaded automatically but the upload queue stayed empty.
Issue 3: I think I went into the "Pictures - Iphone" folder, clicked on the "+" symbol at the top right corner, and went on to add manually a photo. The application froze.
Issue 4: I then turned off the IPhone, and turned it back on again. On starting the app, the UI was unresponsive, simply displaying the list of folders. Additionally the "Uploads" tab got a marker with the number "250" which was the total number of photos present in my phone.
Issue 5: After fiddling about, restarting the phone a few times, the UI started responding. I could go in the "Uploads" tab where the photos were all queued for upload but nothing happened even after waiting a few hours.

[Michele (michele.m)]

The same for me. Selecting some photo after pushing the "+" button didn't work. Nothing happened, though the app didn't freeze. But switching on the localization service make it works. In fact the app asked me the permission to use that service as soon as it started. Then I rebooted the phone (iPhone 3g) and with some difficulties (maybe due to its small ram and a lot of pictures, about 720) it started to upload the entire camera roll.
So I think the key point could be switching on the localization service.

[Tom Gall (tom-gall)]

Digging into this it does indeed appear to be tied to location services. If I delete the app, reinstall and answer no to allowing location services uploading of images from the camera roll does not happen.

Likewise if I try and add an image from the library it won't upload after I've answer no to the dialog requesting access for location services.

Clearly the "silent" failure needs to be fixed and a way to reprompt for location services access is necessary to the user experience.

[Tom Gall (tom-gall)]

If in the case that location services are off (not abled) or just denied for the application, raise an UIAlert with instructions how to fix the issue when the user tries to upload an image from their photo library or when they try and turn on auto uploading.

[Zachery Bir (urbanape)]

Right now, we can't get access to the camera roll without the user granting permission to location information. We can do a better job of communicating why that's necessary.