Drupal 7.14 image upload unstable

Question

I am setting up a site in Drupal 7 for a photographer which includes uploading a large number of photos to the server. My problem is that image upload is extremely unstable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. It seems I am hitting some kind of memory or bandwidth limit, but I don't get any errors.

I created a custom content type for photo albums, with each category (e.g. "portrait", "wedding" etc.) as a node with a number of attached images that I display using views slideshow. Everything works on the front end.

Image upload is handled by an image field and the Media file selector widget. The problem is that sometimes during upload the page will just refresh and the image does not show up in the list of attached images.

I also tried using the Plupload widget that allows uploading several images at once. With this I get a slightly different behavior. The images will "break" after two or three images meaning that they show up as corrupted images with part of the image missing. Sometimes refreshing the page or clearing all Drupal caches will allow me to upload maybe four images at once.

It looks like this

What is strange is that the same exact image file will sometimes upload, and sometimes not.

I am not uploading huge images. They are all manually resized to less than 1600x1600px before uploading, with file sizes between 200 and 600 KB.

---

Drupal 7.14

Media 7.x-1.2

Plupload library 1.5.4

Plupload integration module 7.x-1.0

Plupload widget 7.x-1.0-alpha1

---

PHP settings:

PHP version 5.3.10

Max upload size: 5M

Memory limit: 1024M (increased from 128M using ini_set() in settings.php)

---

Any help will be greatly appreciated! I have been googling for days trying to solve this

:::UPDATE::: I found a temporary workaround. The module Multiupload Imagefield Widget allows multiple image uploads that seem to work for me apart from a few error messages. At least this makes it possible to load my images on to the server effortlessly.

However, this module does not show thumbnails for uploaded images which is crucial for this particular project.

Answer 1

I believe you are experiencing a problem that Plupload has with PHP 5.3.x. I built a site for a client that uses photo galleries (Media and Media Gallery), and via the Pupload Integration Module galleries could be built by simple drag-and-drop of multiple image files. The site is hosted on Rackspace Cloud, which recently upgraded from PHP 5.2.x to PHP 5.3.14. That's when the problems began.

There is a bug report for the Plupload Integration module that shows the error I'm now getting. If you're getting the same error message, I'd recommend that you also take part in the thread, as I just did.