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750
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13-Apr-2006
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Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
3 Nov 15, 00:03
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Hi,
I (based in Germany) would like to show my photos and also some videos from my visits to Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. My first trip to Norway (which I like most) started nearly 11 years ago. OK, it was not the very first trip, I visited Norway during a InterRail ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterRail) trip by train more that 30 years ago. But I actually haven't digitized these photos yet.
Until now I haven't published any photos to a public audience. I started learning Norwegian a year ago (in VHS Volkshochschule / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_high_school) and released my pictures from the North to my classmates on a public album. After migrating from Chameleon to Turtle and fixing some problems I had, I uploaded the new Turtle-based album to my homepage.
There's is a drawback with this album, all comments and texts are still in German. It's not that I'm not willing to translate at least the picture comments, but still haven't found a technical way to solve that problem.
What I would really like know is, how is the user experience of the album? I've seen some other user albums, and realized that the size (in bytes) of the pictures is rarely more than 300 kB. And I also haven't seen any videos in a resolution which goes beyond 480p. But what I've seen sometimes is, that even pictures which are 100 kB or less take some time (up to one second) to load. Now, my question is, what is the reason for that? I've never seen any delays in watching my photos (average 340 kB) or videos (which are in 720p). Does it make any difference if you watch an album from another corner of the globe than where the pictures are hosted? Sorry, if this sounds silly, but I just have no idea.
Looking for a short video (1280x720, just 2 MB) to prove if the video plays smoothly:
http://www.markus-drueck.de/norge/2015%2001%2031%20Norge/2015%2002%2008%20Longyearbyen%20-%20Troms%C3%B8/slides/P1030025.html
Does this video stutter when you are watching it?
Here we go:
http://www.markus-drueck.de/norge/index.html
Enjoy. Any comments and hints are welcome. Cheers, Markus |
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Posts:
8,347
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31-Jan-2006
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
3 Nov 15, 00:52
in response to: MarkusD
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Does it make any difference if you watch an album from another corner of the globe than where the pictures are hosted?
Yes, it makes a difference. If the images are on your PC, they load almost instantly. If they're on a server that is only a few "hops" away from where you live, they also load very quickly. The farther away, the more hops, and the slower the page loading. Our friends in Australia often have to endure very slow page loading from servers in the U.S. and Europe.
The speed also depends a great deal on how good your web host is - if their servers are overloaded, or if their connections to the rest of the Internet are slow and overloaded, visitors will get a bad experience. Your webhost, Strato, gets very poor reviews from other users.
I'm on the east coast of the U.S., with a very reliable Internet connection - a solid, steady 60mpbs. Your images load within a second or so.
I'm not sure how Laza handles preloading in Turtle, but I suspect the page loading would be faster if you were not using separate slide pages. Each image has to load the page, the CSS files, the Javascript files, etc. That adds to the time needed.
Does this video stutter when you are watching it?
No stuttering - smooth playback. But the longer videos do start and stop every 20 seconds or so. This one, for example, stops at least half a dozen times for 10-20 seconds before the buffer fills up enough to continue playback: http://www.markus-drueck.de/norge/2015%2001%2031%20Norge/2015%2002%2002%20Kristinehamn%20-%20%C3%96stersund/slides/P1010662.html |
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
4 Nov 15, 23:50
in response to: JeffTucker
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Does it make any difference if you watch an album from another corner of the globe than where the pictures are hosted?
Yes, it makes a difference. If the images are on your PC, they load almost instantly.
Sure.
If they're on a server that is only a few "hops" away from where you live, they also load very quickly. The farther away, the more hops, and the slower the page loading. Our friends in Australia often have to endure very slow page loading from servers in the U.S. and Europe.
That's indeed something I wasn't aware of.
The speed also depends a great deal on how good your web host is - if their servers are overloaded, or if their connections to the rest of the Internet are slow and overloaded, visitors will get a bad experience. Your webhost, Strato, gets very poor reviews from other users.
Upps. I for myself never had problems with my homepage, neither speed issues nor stability issues. That anyone from abroad could have speed issues is something I hadn't expected.
I'm on the east coast of the U.S., with a very reliable Internet connection - a solid, steady 60mpbs. Your images load within a second or so.
Sounds not tooo bad, but not brilliant also.
I'm not sure how Laza handles preloading in Turtle, but I suspect the page loading would be faster if you were not using separate slide pages. Each image has to load the page, the CSS files, the Javascript files, etc. That adds to the time needed.
I read about this issue some years ago, and didn't understand what it meant. But, which option(s) do I have to change to get rid of using separate slide pages? Is this an option of JA or a skin specific one?
Wow, that is a really bad experience. Starting any of these videos brings me the video in less than a second to the screen with no stuttering or any pause at all.
Thanks a lot for your feedback. |
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
5 Nov 15, 00:00
in response to: MarkusD
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I read about this issue some years ago, and didn't understand what it meant. But, which option(s) do I have to change to get rid of using separate slide pages? Is this an option of JA or a skin specific one?
This is something unique to Turtle, but to get rid of the separate slide pages, go to Album > Settings > Pages and uncheck Make slide pages. Then Make Album again.
The separate slide pages are important to people who are trying to do SEO (search engine optimization) - Google is more likely to index your images if each one is on a separate HTML page, rather than just being called up from the thumbnail page with Javascript.
Having no separate slide pages should make the images load a bit faster, and it will also speed up your album uploading, since there won't be a separate HTML file for each image. |
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Posts:
750
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
5 Nov 15, 00:15
in response to: JeffTucker
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I read about this issue some years ago, and didn't understand what it meant. But, which option(s) do I have to change to get rid of using separate slide pages? Is this an option of JA or a skin specific one?
This is something unique to Turtle, but to get rid of the separate slide pages, go to Album > Settings > Pages and uncheck Make slide pages. Then Make Album again.
Thanks for the info.
The separate slide pages are important to people who are trying to do SEO (search engine optimization) - Google is more likely to index your images if each one is on a separate HTML page, rather than just being called up from the thumbnail page with Javascript.
So that's exactly what I'm looking for. The endmost I want is to optimize my home page for Google. 
Having no separate slide pages should make the images load a bit faster, and it will also speed up your album uploading, since there won't be a separate HTML file for each image.
I c. I'll just do a remake and upload again. But, I have to be realistic about this, the only thing I can expect is that the pictures will load smoother, the stuttering during playback of longer videos will remain. |
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Posts:
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
5 Nov 15, 00:20
in response to: MarkusD
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Well, if you're trying to make Google happy, stick with having separate slide pages. You can't have it both ways.
Personally, I think that unless you're running a website to generate revenue, you should pay no attention to Google at all. Who cares whether your stuff shows up on the 2nd page of search results, or on the 8th page?
The long delays in video playback won't change, in either case.
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
12 Nov 15, 01:13
in response to: JeffTucker
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This is something unique to Turtle, but to get rid of the separate slide pages, go to Album > Settings > Pages and uncheck Make slide pages. Then Make Album again.
I did that and I also reduced the video quality from 720p to 420p.
I appreciate if you or other users would test again how the performance is with the new album:
http://www.markus-drueck.de/norge_2/index.html
To compare two identical videos (first: 1280x720, 128.708.502 Bytes; second: 853x480, 68.301.707 Bytes)
So, the overall experience should be better than with the older album.
TIA, Markus |
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Posts:
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
12 Nov 15, 01:21
in response to: MarkusD
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The image-to-image transitions are now almost immediate - removing the separate slide pages has done exactly what I thought it would. 
The video is better than it was before, but I still got about a 10-second "stall" at around 2:50. Your web host simply isn't coughing up the video file fast enough to keep up with the player. |
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Posts:
4,185
Registered:
4-Aug-2006
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
12 Nov 15, 12:05
in response to: MarkusD
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To compare two identical videos (first: 1280x720, 128.708.502 Bytes; second: 853x480, 68.301.707 Bytes)
On about 5Mb/s line and over wi-if the first does not play well at all. The second played without any problem. |
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
12 Nov 15, 12:10
in response to: MarkusD
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This plays better than before too. Both slideshows ran well but when manually moving from image to image the first always paused, the second seems much more fluid. |
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Posts:
750
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
12 Nov 15, 18:14
in response to: JeffTucker
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The image-to-image transitions are now almost immediate - removing the separate slide pages has done exactly what I thought it would.
The video is better than it was before, but I still got about a 10-second "stall" at around 2:50. Your web host simply isn't coughing up the video file fast enough to keep up with the player.
OK, thanks again for testing and commenting. More important than the video is that the overall slides are doing well, thanks to your advice.
I don't know if its worth to switch my host provider to, possibly, make the videos "fly" too. I'm not aware of a trustful source of a comparison how host providers compete in regards of speed when it comes to accessing data from around the world. |
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750
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
12 Nov 15, 18:23
in response to: RobM
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To compare two identical videos (first: 1280x720, 128.708.502 Bytes; second: 853x480, 68.301.707 Bytes)
On about 5Mb/s line and over wi-if the first does not play well at all. The second played without any problem.
Thanks to you also for testing and commenting. It seems that the fact that you are from the UK, which is not that far from Germany, results in a better performance, even with a much lower bandwidth, for example in comparison to jGromits much higher bandwidth, but sitting thousands of miles from the source. I wasn't aware of that a long distance still might have such an impact these days. |
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750
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
9 Mar 22, 09:01
in response to: MarkusD
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Hi,
after being more than two years at home, for obvious reasons, I did it again. Travelling up to the north, to Svalbard (Spitzbergen). This time not to attend the PolarJazz Festival but the return of the sun ( https://www.solfest.no/) in Longyearbyen, which takes place on every 8th of March. Of course the sun is visible for several weeks now in many parts of the islands, but because of surrounding hills it takes that long that a sunbeam hits parts of Longyearbyen.
A big part of the inhabitants, and visitors of course, are participating in this event. The Kindergarden and teenagers from the schools are singing songs. And like a miracle the sun beams came through the clouds. A very special moment, all people are shouting and clapping hands.
Today I'm flying back to the Norwegian mainland and take my tour back with my own car trough Norway back to home.
The journey so far:
https://markus-drueck.de/202203
Cheers, Markus |
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Re: Photos from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Posted:
9 Mar 22, 11:01
in response to: MarkusD
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Nice images of the meteorological events common to he area. I have only once noticed Sun dogs/Mock Suns/Parhelion in the UK.
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