Over the last week, I’ve gotten several e-mails directly and several in the photos Yahoo! Group regarding browser timeout issues. Most often, people experiencing this have been using Safari which has a 60 second timeout. When loading a folder of images, it will often take longer than 60 seconds and Safari will stop waiting at 60 seconds and show a timeout error message.

I did a quick search and found SafariNoTimeout. This sets the Safari timeout to 10 minutes which was plenty long for me. It can be set longer or shorter if you are comfortable typing in what you’re told in a Terminal window. I hope this restriction is removed in upcoming Safari releases.

I may try to find a way to make photos work in Safari (or other browsers that have a similar timeout setting) without this kind of hack in the future – for now, get the hack. 🙂

I typically load between 50-200 photos at a time from a single folder. I have found that if I load more than that I’m not able to enter meaningful metadata about the photos in that folder. Loading 187 6 megapixel photos I took at a baseball game is taking about 240 seconds on my PowerBook. This is not a problem for me on Mac IE (yuck), Camino and now Safari with the SafariNoTimeout hack.

I tried loading a folder with 350 photos on a PC using both Internet Explorer and Mozilla. Both browsers loaded the photos without timing out. Loading all 350 photos took about 490 seconds.

If you are experiencing this problem, send me a note. Please include your operating system, browser, browser version, web server (if you know it) and how many photos you are trying to load.

This post is part of the project: Photos. View the project timeline for more context on this post.