Frustrated by "Image not available yet, please try again in a few minutes."

This message appears again and again for months. Apparently this is an operational problem on servers of archive.org. It creates the impression that there are difficulties to get the problem under control. It continues to give the impression that it is not the machines that are responsible, but the people who manage these machines. Experience shows that it seems difficult to solve the problem. I can not imagine the people who run archive.org are amateurs. How are the problems explained differently? Is there any hope to solve these problems? The problem has been hindering active users for a long time. They expect a solution that will solve the problem not only now but permanently.

Maybe, I didn’t explain the problem sufficient: Go to the main page of the project https://musicbrainz.org. Look at the list with title “Recent Additions”. It is likely that there is to read: “Image not available yet, please try again in a few minutes.” – Either for all recent additions, or for parts thereof. This depends on the access date and time. Currently all entries are affected. This is a well-known condition that has often been observed in recent months.

This behavior is apparently caused by servers of the domain archive.org or their administrators. It harms the project MusicBrainz for months. It should be in the interest of MusicBrainz and its users and readers to solve the problem in collaboration with archive.org.

To illustrate this theme a bit more: The advice “… please try again in a few minutes” frustrates editors and users. Experience shows, “few minutes” are not sufficient. In a lot of cases it takes hours. This means: The system formulates expectations that it can not fulfill. We and users of the system expect a serious and honest system. Misleading claims harm the project.

theres no need to get upset because no one has replied if you dont get an answer it just means that the people who have seen it so far can not help. :slight_smile:

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In the last few weeks I have found that uploading even the tiniest of images does take longer to appear. But I never see hours of wait. Usually it means I have to move on to processing my next release before returning to download the artwork for the one I just uploaded.

This is certainly better than earlier this year when artwork was just plain failing to download. Or constantly spitting out warnings from me Eset Anti-Virus.

The archive.org servers are used by many different projects. Not just the CAA. And does often need an extra layer of patience when dealing with the servers. I expect the load on them is pretty high.

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If I understand it correctly, you’re talking about the cover art images being shown on the front page of MusicBrainz, correct?

The cover art images shown here is always the most recently added releases that has a front cover art image uploaded for it. This means that the uploads being shown on the MB front page are very recent most of the time, and most of the time it can take a couple of minutes for the IA/CAA to process an image to have a thumbnail available for it. When these couple of minutes are gone and you reload the page… more releases will have been added to MusicBrainz, which may have cover art, which may need another couple of minutes to be processed by CAA/IA. This leads to this situation where there will almost always be at least one “Image not available yet” on the MusicBrainz front page, because all y’all wonderful editors add data to MusicBrainz (and CAA) faster than it can be processed. Which is fantastic! Good job everyone! :slight_smile:

I filed this ticket on your behalf though, since I agree it can be a bit annoying to see:

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I found that in at least one case I was getting the “image not available yet” message when I looked up a release on my phone, but could see the images when I looked at the release from my laptop. Strange.

The topic has frustrated me for months, because it always comes back to similar situations. It has two aspects:

  • I am disabled in my workflow. Generating preview images does not take minutes but hours. Not always but often.
  • Since I’m often unsure whether the issue is not just about my uploaded images, I often look at the project’s homepage in these situations, in the last section “Recent Additions.”

Observing the homepage is an indicator of whether the problem I am observing is singular or more general in character. So I regularly observe the homepage of the project. I do not know if other users of the project do that too. My suspicion is: Users of the system are not watching the homepage of the system.

The homepage of the project is important. It is the first address for those interested in the project. If the homepage is repeatedly burdened with problems, this is detrimental to the project. It should be in the interest of all readers and users of the project that no error messages appear on the project’s homepage. This condition is not reached.

Visitors of the website https://musicbrainz.org are regularly confronted with the message “Image not available yet, please try again in a few minutes.” That does not make a good impression.
The project seems to be worse than it is. We should avoid that.

Therefore, questions arise: What should be done to better present the project? A homepage with error messages is not helpful. It damages the reputation of the project. It should be in our interest to solve this problem. It is not a temporary problem that arises in individual cases. It is a permanent problem. It gives the impression that this enduring problem has not yet been recognized by the responsible people. At the moment we can only speculate about the causes. We should avoid discussing such speculation. Instead, we should try to find the necessary contacts – those responsible for operating the system. Only these people are able to solve the problem. If they can not solve the problem then they are not suitable in their role. Then one should seek experts who are able to solve the problem.

I’m sorry to recommend such drastic measures. My many years of professional experience in large IT projects leads me to such a recommendation. Typically, machines are not the cause of problems, but people who operate the machines. Or people who designed the system.

Without a doubt: We need to take action. Something has to be done. Regular visits to the homepage of the project should be a reason to do something.

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I think what Freso suggested in the ticket he created above would solve this: Images on the homepage should only be presented once they actually got processed, it should not show any images that are still queued up for processing.

The homepage problem is “permanent” because it is inherent to how the images are handled right now. The homepage shows just added data, which means this is the data with images that is most likely to have not yet been processed. The solution is to show data only if the images have been processed.

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The ticket sounds a sensible solution for the front page. Especially the additional notes. I assume not all images will take the same time to process.

Running that image reel with a time lag to allow for checking if the image is there seems a simple and elegant solution.

“Looking ahead” at the next five images in the queue, are they strictly processed one by one? So the big fat 160MB PNGs will slightly delay the queue for a while. And then it will whizz through on a number of smaller images.

But do also notice that @PatriciaTegtmeier is not just talking of the front page. @PatriciaTegtmeier uploads a HUGE volume of artwork so I can understand how they get frustrated. It becomes a confusing pattern of uploading artwork and then having to go onto the next Release or two before being able to come back and check the thumbnails of the first one uploaded.

I build these delays into my workflow because I am also usually working on Picard on a different screen. Sorting out tracks on the hard disk. Researching some data.

This weekend it was noticeable that I’d often upload the artwork, and then need to go on to my next Release or two to work on, before returning at the end to download the artwork to Picard and finish the tagging of that first release.

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I haveI have a user script that will display the original image if the thumbnail is not yet generated, in edit list pages at least.
I don’t remember its name right now but can find it back if needed.

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It seems like the CAA is completely down right now (every request times out) because it doesn’t load any image when I’m browsing the MB website :frowning:

Edit: Now it’s working again :slight_smile:

@all: Thanks for your contributions!

@Freso: Thanks for establishing a ticket! Recently I commented it. Let’s stop the discussion of this theme here. Instead the ticket system should be a better place to continue the discussion of this issue.

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I have to contradict. I don’t upload a “HUGE volume of artwork”. I know what “huge” amounts means. According to my professional experience: “huge” concerns systems e. g. dealing with billions of data sets a day (or an hour). I know such systems. My contributions (and any other contributions on this system) are far away to be “huge”. In comparison to systems with real “huge” data traffic, MusicBrainz and coverartarchive.org (archive.org too) are “low traffic” system.

Whether huge or low traffic: Such systems need to be managed professionally. Conceptual and operative.

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@PatriciaTegtmeier: Just accept the compliment from @IvanDobsky: You ARE doing a great job in adding a very big amount of high quality data (including artwork) to the DB :+1:

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@PatriciaTegtmeier I am very sorry if you took offence at what was supposed to be a compliment. You do a great job at adding a lot of well checked and quality artwork. Sometimes I pick the wrong words. It was supposed to be 100% positive.

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Thanks a lot for the compliments!

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Does anyone know why sometimes some images are stuck forever in a twilight zone?