Be more clear about maximum upload size

[sreymer]

I continually get error messages when uploading a photo to SceneVR which was shot in Apple iPhone panorama mode. This is the most recent and most common error but I've received others as well:

Error Uploading SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data

I've edited and converted the photos from HEIC to JPG format. I've tried various browsers and Windows, Mac and iOS. I've been able to successfully upload non-pano photos. I don't have a clue as to what might be wrong or how to fix it.

[JoeGermuska]

This message typically occurs when an uncaught error occurs, resulting in a regular (HTML) web page being sent back, instead of JSON. The HTML cannot be parsed as JSON, hence the unexpected character. But we don't have any record of what happened when you see that.

Your troubleshooting strategies sound spot-on. However, I have just tried uploading a new pano shot on my iphone, as well as an example I found on the web, and both upload without error, so it's not a general issue.

Would you be willing to put your images somewhere on the internet where we could download them and see if it's something about them? One theory is file size; I thought that was being handled deliberately in the code, but I may be wrong. My iphone is kind of old, so my pano was <3MB, but I also uploaded one from the internet that was about 4MB. Still, I could see a newer iphone creating substantially larger images.

[sreymer]

The one(s) I've been trying to upload were 20+ MB so that may indeed be the issue. I'll try to decrease file size and see if that helps. Thanks for taking a look.

[sreymer]

Yes, that was the answer. Thanks!

[JoeGermuska]

Thanks for the follow-up! Clearly this is something we could handle better, so I've renamed this issue, and we'll leave it open as something to fix.

Things we should do:

• Catch "upload too large" messages and translate them to a clear message to the uploader
• Also document maximum upload size before people make uploads
• Since the authoring UI is designed to work well on mobile, we should learn more about which phones natively create images which are larger than our threshold, and if there's anything we can do besides tell people to download images and do the authoring on a non-phone