Question

I’m building a Silverlight app where users select photos from their computer, edit an associated title/description/tags etc. and then upload to a web server via WCF. Actually everything’s working perfectly just with a little problem. I want to show the thumbnails of the photos in a list before uploading, and to achieve that, the only way I know is to load the file and then process it. If the users selects about 20 files, sllauncher.exe eats huge amount of RAM, around a gigabyte (well it could be more than normal for Photoshop/3ds max, or Firefox that has run for an half an hour, but it IS too much for a web photo uploader app), and when I try to upload the images, the app even tries to load more and crashes completely. I want to be able to upload more photos, like a hundred or more, at a time, but how can I achieve that while still having the thumbnail functionality? One thing is queuing the uploads and therefore the loading of the files, but it would cause the thumbnails also not to load. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I’d load the picture after it has been added to the application, get the thumbnail and unload the picture – then the user may enter his information on the picture. When it’s completed, the original file is put in a queue for upload. That way, only two pictures at once are handled at max, thus freeing the memory from unneeded data.