Why Instagram is so fast at uploading photos

http://speakerdeck.com/u/mikeyk/p/secrets-to-lightning-fast-mobile-design?slide=82

by daviday • 14 years ago

259 102 14 years ago

speakerdeck.com

cskau• 14 years ago

Doesn't that mean they actually start grabbing the photos before really getting permission from the user?

Surely they probably got it covered in the Terms, but it still strikes me as playing slightly dirty..

panacea• 14 years ago

Playing the Devil's advocate (IANOCoder), but perhaps the bulk of the 1s&0s are being uploaded and then decrypted by sending a small string when the user selects "publish"?

Probably not.

mistercow• 14 years ago

That would be the responsible way to do it, surely, although they should still mention it in the TOS.

eli2• 14 years ago

That's a little silly. How is trusting them to correctly implement an encryption scheme terribly different from trusting them to responsibly delete aborted photos in the first place?

minikites• 14 years ago

Tapping the green checkmark isn't enough permission?

skeletonjelly7• 14 years ago

So Instagram has photos I don't click "upload" on. Well that's nice to know.

Edit: So I tried to use a proxy on my phone but it looks like Instragram on Android doesn't honour the wireless proxy server. Anyone else want to do some digging?

yashg• 14 years ago

If you don't select upload then they can either stop the process if the photo hasn't been uploaded yet OR if its complete then they can send a signal and delete a photo.

But yeah its waste of bandwidth for the user if he decides against uploading the photo.

simonw• 14 years ago

I imagine they start uploading when you click the greet "tick" button.

NathanKP• 14 years ago

Exactly. All this outrage about photos being uploaded without permission is overblown, because tapping the green check button is just the same as clicking a submit button. Instagram just separates the upload process from the process for setting the photo's metadata, which is very intelligent and more efficient.

avbor• 14 years ago

On slide 89 it mentions that they delete the data if the user cancels it.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

And of course they do. They respect user choice and privacy. Whilst you can be all tin-foil hat and think they are going to keep these "cancelled" photos, I would seriously doubt it.

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

Do they also delete photos from a backend database backup that might've occurred after the upload but before the user cancelled the photo?

moron• 14 years ago

Ha, I love the HN reaction to this. Sperging out about Instagram getting photos they're "not supposed to", fake outrage about fake privacy breaches, all while blatantly ignoring this fact.

And of course, I'm sure all this fake outrage has nothing to do with Instagram's recent purchase by Facebook.

pjscott• 14 years ago

The easy technical workaround would be to pre-send the photos encrypted with a random key, and only send the key after you explicitly click "upload". At least that way you could verify with a proxy that they were, in fact, not seeing photos you haven't sent them the keys for.

gizzlon• 14 years ago

Good idea.. they should do this.. Maybe the encryption is too "heavy" for mobile phones? (uses too much battery ore whatever) ?

veyron• 14 years ago

Where in the TOS does it allow them to upload photos that the users don't explicitly select?

skeletonjelly7• 14 years ago

I just had a skim through and I can't see anything under T&S nor in the Privacy Policy.

guan• 14 years ago

The user does explicitly either take the photo inside the Instagram app or select it. Note that the final button that published the photo to the user’s stream is labeled Done, not Upload. They don’t just arbitrarily upload photos from the camera roll or from the camera before the user has tapped the camera shutter button.

EDIT: And as others have pointed out, photos are only uploaded after the user has selected a filter and tapped the green check mark, not as soon as they are taken.

poglet• 14 years ago

On the Android version it says Upload instead of Done. I can't tell what point it starts uploading but it seems to appear pretty quick on my page.

stephen_g2• 14 years ago

I think it's assumed that you are going to post any photos you take when you use Instagram - as the app doesn't actually save photos to your phone unless you post it (or if the upload fails).

I would understand the concern if it acted like a camera app - ie, you take a photo, it's saved to your phone's photostream, and afterwards you can choose to hit upload, but since you can't use it in that way (it's either post it or the photo is gone) I don't really see a problem.

ambirex• 14 years ago

A little devil's avocate: Isn't Instagram primarily a photo sharing app? I'm not sure why people are complaining that it starts the upload on filter completion.

My only question is how long are photos not marked as user initiated uploads kept?

skeletonjelly7• 14 years ago

True. But there's a disconnect between the common person's understanding of the process and what's happening. It matters because it's user content.

As for the deletion, who knows. They could say anything and the users would have no way to tell unless they slip up.

chollida12• 14 years ago

To me this seems way offside.

What if I, a regular user, uses instagram for taking all my photos.

What if I take nude photos of my wife. Should I really expect instagram to upload them without my permission?

I'm guessing 99% of people would not only be surprised by this behavior, but also outraged.

dpcx• 14 years ago

If you're taking nude photos of your wife with an app that is specifically known for sharing photos, you're doing it wrong.

99% of people are probably very happy that their uploads don't take 5 minutes once they hit save. To them, it's worth the privacy "risk".

citricsquid• 14 years ago

They're uploaded once you get to the caption screen, not when you take the photo.

stephen_g2• 14 years ago

You probably wouldn't use Instagram for taking all your photos.

On the iPhone at least, it only saves photos if you post them. You wouldn't be able to use it as a camera for private photos unless you didn't want to keep them.

There is one work around - you can get it to save the photo if the upload fails, so if you put your phone in airplane mode, you can take a private photo. Apart from that, Instagram only works as a sharing app, not a general camera. I think since it works this way, 99% of people won't care.

whalesalad• 14 years ago

There is a difference between upload and publish. The app might be uploading the photo in the background, but that's to get it over the wire to instagram. The publish isn't being made (aka, the photo being visible to anyone) until you complete the upload process.

megablast• 14 years ago

Does it bother you if no one ever sees those images that are uploaded?

splattne• 14 years ago

If you take nude photos of your wife, you're using the wrong app and you know it. Also, what's your Instagram user name?

quanticle• 14 years ago

Instagram is a photo sharing service. They've never hidden that aspect. The default user expectation is uploading and sharing. I don't see why immediately initiating the upload would be unexpected for the user.

VeejayRampay2• 14 years ago

Uploaded doesn't mean it's permanently stored, it only means that part of the file might have been uploaded already by the time you confirm the upload.

If your intention was in fact to upload the photo, good on you, you save a few precious seconds. If your intention was not to upload the photo, then they simply cut the connection, send a delete order and move on.

masklinn5• 14 years ago

> I'm not sure why people are complaining that it starts the upload on filter completion.

If it put responsiveness before everything else, it could even start uploading before the filters are applied and apply the filters server-side when they are validated.

While this would significantly increase server load (and duplicate the work, as filters would be applied both by the phone and by the server), it would make the visible upload window even lower (or even not exist at all).

hswolff• 14 years ago

Why is Speakerdeck polluting my back history? :(

jeffjose• 14 years ago

Gmail used to do that with their attachment. You choose the attachment, and it silently starts to upload. Most applications wait for you to hit "Send" to start uploading.

jpk• 14 years ago

It used to. It still does, but it used to, too.

raganwald• 14 years ago

Thank you, Mitch Hedberg. Also, and strangely appropriate for an Instagram thread:

One time, this guy handed me a picture of him, he said,"Here's a picture of me when I was younger." Every picture is of you when you were younger. "Here's a picture of me when I'm older." "You son-of-a-bitch! How'd you pull that off? Lemme see that camera... what's it look like?“

gus_massa• 14 years ago

There was a progress bar that shows that the progresses of the file upload. It was not secret.

stordoff• 14 years ago

There still is the progress bar.

lucaspiller• 14 years ago

Does anyone know what the sign up slide is about (http://speakerdeck.com/u/mikeyk/p/secrets-to-lightning-fast-...)? Do they create a user account when you hit the form, then fill it in with your details asynchronously later?

maykelange• 14 years ago

I think they're preloading the 'suggested' photos and data.

bwill• 14 years ago

that's probably when they were uploading all your contacts info so they could suggest friends to you...

eli2• 14 years ago

I don't think that's playing dirty at all. I think it's quite clever.

joe-mccann• 14 years ago

The iOS SDK I'm building at work ultimately does the same thing. Much better UX.

rogerchucker4• 14 years ago

I trust Instagram to not engage in monkey business with my data. Having said that, this is flirting with the path-address-book kind of privacy-related scrutiny. There has to be a way of telling the user at WHAT POINT the data has started uploading. The progress bar of photo uploads has to mean what it shows or else it is a plain and simple deception (even if it's in the name of performance and user experience). I can't tell if this will erode trust though but don't be surprised if a few make a loud noise about it.

Privacy concern and trust form a chicken-egg problem. I wish the Stanford-esque brains behind these tech companies had a better grasp on it.

Aqua_Geek• 14 years ago

> I trust Instagram to not engage in monkey business with my data.

Do you trust Facebook to the same extent?

rogerchucker4• 14 years ago

Actually yes I do trust them to the same extent. But that's a choice I have made based on my perceived trust level. I am even OK with advertisers harvesting my photos (not sure if that is possible yet). My main desired privacy control is whether people that are not supposed to see my photos or browse through my galleries, actually get to do that. That's not necessarily a monkey business but an outcome of a privacy implementation flaw (assuming it is unintentional). That will certainly have an impact on my trust level for Facebook. The difference with instagram is that you go into instagram knowing that everything is public and so is the general sharing norm on that platform.

waveturtle• 14 years ago

I assumed this was the case because the "time since" label on a freshly posted photo is usually between 10-20 seconds, indicating they had my photo well before I tapped "Done." I think it's a pretty genius little UX hack to make the process feel quick.

tomerv• 14 years ago

I'm not an Instagram user, so I may be off base... but why not start uploading the photo right when the user snapped it, i.e. before selecting a filter. Then apply the selected filter server-side on the original photo. That way you save a few more seconds while the user is selecting the filter.

leviathant• 14 years ago

Image manipulation on a large scale is expensive. Leaving it up to the user's device to run the image through filters eliminates server strain.

masklinn5• 14 years ago

Definitely the case especially since they were on Amazon, and thus had to pay for EC2 minutes.

Now that they're at Facebook, server load shouldn't be a problem anymore though. So they could implement that.

sandipc• 14 years ago

for previewing each filter's effects, this would require constant downloads of the processed images off the server in addition to the initial upload

artursapek• 14 years ago

No it wouldn't. You could run the filter on the client, then finally run it on the server when their choice is made.

hk__2• 14 years ago

Chrome does the same, when you right-clic on a file and select "Save as…", the download begin in a temporary file, and then when you select the emplacement where you want to put the new file, it moves the temporary file in it.

icebraining• 14 years ago

Firefox does that too.

hendi_• 14 years ago

Even IE6 did it.

zobzu2• 14 years ago

Firefox.. since nightly 15 i think also does stuff like, when you go to the search box, it open the connection to the http server before sending the search request i believe chrome does it too

masklinn5• 14 years ago

I don't know a browser which does not do that. They need to start the download to get the metadata (file name and type), and they'll do it if only because shitty servers may react very badly to the browser just stopping with a full socket buffer.

skeletonjelly7• 14 years ago

They don't need to start it to get the metadata. All that's sent is the content-disposition header with the suggested file name.

r0s• 14 years ago

I've always wondered why client side resizing isn't more popular, it would give a major edge over any web upload.

devinfoley• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure they do client side resizing as well.

sikachu_• 14 years ago

I found it brilliant first time I founded that out myself. It's more like improving user's experience from their end.

jpkeisala• 14 years ago

I though it was slow

bratsche• 14 years ago

Seriously, why is this on hacker news? This is ridiculous. I'd downvote this if we were on reddit. :)

bdittmer• 14 years ago

I'm really surprised by the number of commenters who didn't figure this out already?

darkstar999• 14 years ago

Yes. Any other questions?

ajross• 14 years ago

The Google+ Android app does basically the same thing. It syncs everything from your camera to the cloud (configurable, but I believe the default is to sync always when on wifi), where you can choose to share them at your leisure. It's actually really handy. My wife is routinely not uploading cute kid photos to Facebook from her iPhone because it's too much of an annoyance (or because she doesn't want to compose the text to go with it). I can do it at my desktop whenever the mood hits me.

yellowbkpk• 14 years ago

It's important to mention that when you install the Google+ app one of the configuration steps asks if you want to auto-upload your photos. You have three options: "Upload over wifi only", "Upload over wifi and mobile", and "Don't automatically upload". I believe the default is wifi-only.

You can turn it off later in the settings quite easily.

togasystems• 14 years ago

We used the same idea with video uploads.

j2labs• 14 years ago

It's the little things...

phil2• 14 years ago

Did Instagram v1 had this feature?

They added high-res photos in v2 and the early upload seems like maybe an attempt not to have the app start feeling much much slower.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

Everything he says is completely applicable to online games. Online games need to be designed around responsiveness. Another way to put it: the online game design should be pervasively focused on creating the illusion of low/no latency.

An example in an online game I'm designing: damage and deaths are finalized with a one second delay. This way, the clients can optimistically render ships and combat effects, but everything is still verified/finalized on the server.

phil2• 14 years ago

This is such a great deck. Unless you're working on a photo sharing app, this slide might offer more generally useful advice:

http://speakerdeck.com/u/mikeyk/p/secrets-to-lightning-fast-...

zobzu2• 14 years ago

FYI Google instant (which is integrated, at least in AOSP) or smth does the same, by default. That is it uploads your pictures instantly to Google picture thingy. You can turn it off thanksfully.

ot• 14 years ago

Their motivation for speed is very well put:

"mobile experiences fill gaps while we wait. no one wants to wait while they wait"

Awesome quote

tb• 14 years ago

I absolutely agree. I now have an instinctive reaction to reach for my pocket whenever I'm feeling the slightest bit impatient, and I have caught myself on a couple of occasions reaching for my pocket when I already have my phone out, because I'm waiting for a page to load in the mobile browser.

eridius• 14 years ago

When I reboot my computer, I very often find myself trying to cmd-tab over into Safari to browse the web while I wait for my computer to boot.

MrKurtHaeusler• 14 years ago

Surprised most are concerned on privacy grounds. My first thought was, wow this could chew up many users monthly bandwidth quotas.

junto• 14 years ago

I have just realised that Intagram have an abundance of phallus photos that were never intended for upload!

jinushaun• 14 years ago

I always suspected that.

Why Instagram is so fast at uploading photos

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