Missing SOME Images

[Rod Hewitt]

For some reason I’ve lost some of my images, it shows the .jpeg name but no image.

But on other entries the images are all fine???

See attached image

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[Brendan]

Hi Rod,

Do you have the images on any of your other devices still? It may be that they didn’t sync to your Mac. If you can remove and re-add them from your other devices they should show up on your Mac after syncing.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Rod Hewitt]

I do have all the images saved in Google photos but I’ve check all the other machines and they are missing on all of them its just strange how some are missing and some aren’t??

Im guessing ive just got to reimport them, which is a shame :(

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[Rod Hewitt]

Ive been doing some tests, Ive added the pictures to the entries and all fine on the iMac I’m working on then set it to Sync and then look try to look at the New entry on another iMac and the entry is showing but not showing the images again….

What am I doing wrong??? Please help me :(

[Brendan]

Hi Rod,

Which sync service are you using? And did you let Tap Forms on the Mac you set the photos on complete its sync operation? That is, if you added a photo, then quit Tap Forms, it may not have had enough time to upload the photos.

And make sure each document has the same internal Document ID. You can see that on the Sync Settings screens.

Thanks,

Brendan

[David Salgueiro]

Hi both,

In my experience, this has been a longstanding issue with Tap Forms 5. Despite testing and trying different things like deleting and re-setting the images (as suggested by Brendan), the simple fact remains that syncing, whether via iCloud or Nearby, on iPad or iPhone or Mac, does randomly cause occasional loss of photos.

This is problematic not only because of the loss of data, but also because it is easy to miss in a table with a couple of hundred records with images. Tap Forms is a great database app that I have used for years, but this loss of data is, to me, a showstopper. I depend on it for keeping records of documents and I cannot afford for them to go missing. Currently, I have to keep rechecking every record whenever I change or add anything, which is time consuming, particularly when also having to fix problems.

I was really hoping that this issue would get picked up and fixed, as I think it is such a big problem with the app. Sadly, I have had to look at alternatives as I can’t see a fix coming any time soon, unless Brendan manages to identify the cause of the problem. With so much data invested in this app, it is a hard decision to abandon it and migrate to an alternative. But there we are…

So the takeaway from this is: do not store images in Tap Forms if you plan to sync the database.

Despite that, thanks for making Tap Forms, Brendan. It has genuinely helped me in the past. I hope you continue its development and you manage to fix this issue.

Wishing you the very best,

David

Edit:
This is not meant as a criticism. Making apps like these is almost an artform. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the problem was due to some external component messing up behind the scenes.

[Sam Moffatt]

I use sync with attachment heavy databases via CouchDB without significant issues. I can’t comment on the Nearby sync but it’s the same technology. iCloud has a long history of issues and I’m not surprised at the posts about TF having sync issues with iCloud. I also find iCloud brutally slow due to their rate limiting which is ameliorated with running ones own CouchDB server.

The one challenge with a distributed peer to peer replication topology is that when there are conflicts due to changes on multiple devices that sooner or later conflict resolution generally involves discarding a change. Nearby sync is also unidirectional so you need to make sure both sides are pulling changes otherwise you can introduce conflicts quickly (when you add a remote device to Nearby sync, you pull it’s changes but you don’t push your changes; you need to add your local device to the remote device for bidirectional sync). iCloud sync will also have this problem which I feel can be exacerbated due to the throttling it puts in place. I’ve also seen this with CouchDB as well where I need to make sure I wait for sync to finish otherwise my edit of the older version of the record can wipe out other changes.

Many moons ago there was an issue with the sync system around attachments where it would have a mismatched internal revision identifier but that has been fixed for what feels like years now and myself I’ve not seen any issues. I did run into a recent change that CouchDB 3.x set the document size limit to 8MB which broke a few records of mine that had high resolution images embedded in a notes field. That was fixed by removing said high resolution images from those fields.

I will say one thing I’ve noticed is sometimes if I pick up a device that hasn’t been sync’d for a while it can introduce some weirdness with stuff being picked up. I haven’t seen this behaviour for a while but there were some times it felt like conflict resolution got it wrong. Again with a stable CouchDB server this seems less problematic.

The other advantage of setting up a CouchDB server is you can also set up backups and versioning. You can checkout my GitHub repo for how to get it setup and running which will give you an extra safety net for both the documents and any attachments. I run this backup script on a 2011 iMac I have to keep track of my documents. I also use a backup of my documents via Time Machine as well but that’s more for ensuring I can rewind a document if something gets corrupted.

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