Photos Disappeared

[Drew Allen]

I have the latest version of Tap Forms on my iPhone and Mac.

I created a form on my iPhone that had a photo picker. I created a new entry which I added 15 or so photos to, as well as some other textual and number fields. iCloud sync was on the entire time. There seemed to be no major issues.

However, when I went to sync it on my Mac, all the text and number data populated, but no photos showed up. I later went to my iPhone and now the photos are gone there. I didn’t do anything with deleting photos on either device.

The photos may still be in the database itself, since the size is rather large for only one entry (93Mb).

I can’t have this disappearing photo issue happen with my databases. I rely on the photos being there, particular when I’m out in the field.

Why does this happen and what can I do about it? Maybe it’s a bug?

[Brendan]

Hi Drew,

I’m not sure what would have caused that problem. Perhaps the photos didn’t complete uploading in time for the record to appear on the other device. Did you modify the record on the Mac at all?

[Drew Allen]

They were on my phone for quite awhile before I opened the record on the Mac. I did not modify the form when I opened it on the Mac. When I go into the database package now in Finder now, I can see all the photo .blob files sitting there, but they aren’t displaying in my database record in Tap Forms.

[Drew Allen]

I’m finding syncing photos in records between Tap Forms Mac and iPhone using iCloud is VERY finicky. To the point where photos may just disappear.

I’ve run a couple more tests, including deleting the original record I was having trouble with, and I get very unpredictable results. When I add a photo to a record from my Mac, it will show up on my iPhone. But, I add another photo to the record on my iPhone, and the first photo deletes from the record on both devices after syncing, but the newly added photo shows up on both. I’m also getting frequent sync errors on my iPhone when it comes to syncing a record with photos.

This unreliability makes Tap Forms unusable. I can’t have data just disappearing. I may try Cloudant for syncing.

[Brendan]

I’ve got an update coming out soon which has a bunch of improvements to the iCloud syncing, especially to avoid those sync errors people have been seeing.

I’ll do some more tests with editing photos on both the Mac and iOS versions for the same record to see what happens. Tap Forms picks the record that has been modified last if you edit the same record on two different devices though.

Also, on custom layouts, Tap Forms only displays the first photo. Only on the Default Layout can you see all of the photos.

[Drew Allen]

Okay, thank you for looking into this. And glad to hear there are improvements coming out to iCloud syncing. Hopefully that will be soon.

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