Downloads are now 5X faster, and more friendly

DPHOTO isn’t just for storing and showing off your photos – the download feature also makes it a really convenient way to deliver and distribute your high-resolution photos and videos. Over the last year we’ve completely redesigned our download process to make it faster, more reliable, and more user-friendly.

TL;DR

• Downloads are now 5X faster, and more reliable
• Downloads now display progress bar and time remaining
• Downloads can now be paused and resumed

Five Times Faster

Downloads are now faster. Much, much, much faster. On average, about five times faster, which will literally save you hours when downloading large albums.

Most of this speed increase comes from streamlining the download process. There is no longer a server between you and file you want to download – you now have a direct connection to the file you want. Basically, your download will always be as fast as your internet connection can handle.

Additionally, all downloads are now delivered via a content delivery network (CDN), which provides low-latency, optimised network connections, and enables the caching of files at edge locations around the world. Which is a very technical way of saying that the download is faster because the file doesn’t have to travel as far.

Visible Progress

When you click to download an album or selection of files, we have to quickly gather all those files together and package them into a zip file for you. Creating really large (sometimes 20GB or more) zip files on demand is quite a challenge – and usually involves a few compromises.

For the past 10 years we have been delivering ‘streaming’ zip files. The main benefit of streaming zips is they start downloading immediately, rather than having to wait for 5 or 10 minutes while the server finishes building the entire zip file for you. Streaming zips have limitations though, which become increasingly apparent and annoying the larger the download is:

• Browsers don’t know the final size of a streaming zip, so they can’t display a progress bar, or estimate the time remaining.
• You can’t resume a streaming zip, so if your connection gets interrupted for some reason, your download restarts from the beginning.

We’re very happy to say that these limitations no longer apply. Thanks to some very clever code and a little bit of cloud computing magic, we can now create ridiculously big zip files (e.g. 20GB) in mere seconds, which means we no longer need to rely on streaming zips.

So downloading large files on DPHOTO is now a much better experience – you get an instant start to your download, you get to see a progress bar and time remaining, and you also have the option to resume your download if you need to. And it’s way faster too.

These new download features are available now through our HTML galleries. If you haven’t switched over yet, go to Director > Galleries > HTML, and turn on your HTML gallery.