Hi @PBMike, I’m glad you’ve found a way to improve the performance.
I’ve been looking into the performance of your site and published a hidden test album to see how it performs from my end. It published quite slowly and failed with a 500 error after 33 photos.
Your site has a very large number of albums and photos. Four times as many photos as my personal LR catalogue that spans 18 years, which nags at me as something I need to pare back by at least half. Backlight’s use of SQLite for a database on shared hosting can have performance issues with such large volumes of photos and albums.
If the size of content is indeed affecting performance, then you could try improving it by removing old content. Another option could be to go to a higher tier of hosting. For example from shared hosting to a VPS (if you don’t already have that level of hosting).
Coincidentally, as I only recently discovered, LR’s catalogues are also SQLite databases. In of themselves, they can be quite performant, but not necessarily so on shared hosting.
I’ve been lazy about trimming the galleries on my website. I’ve hidden a bunch, but failed to remove them. I’m in the process of removing old galleries now. I’d like to only keep 1 year of galleries available on the web.
My LR catalog has >600k photos. I’ve been a sports shooter since 2014. Since I’ve gotten the Nikon Z9, I’ve been shooting anywhere from 5-10k photos per game. I pare that down to <1000 for publishing to galleries. I do all sports in our area from Little League through High School. We’re a small town, but we’ve got lots for the kids to do.
I’m also the school photographer, which puts me into the performing arts and other events. Keeps me very busy.
Plus, we live in the town closest to the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. It’s very picturesque, and senior photos out in the woods with mountains in the background are awesome.
When I have time (which hasn’t been lately), I like to hike in the woods and I always carry my camera. The best of any world!
Keep Backlight awesome and thanks for all the help!
If you can use the BL upload method, it’s going to be a lot faster than using LR. My usage requires that I use LR. If you look at one of my sports galleries at Minutemen Baseball - Varsity & JV - Photography by Mike, you’ll see that it wouldn’t be easy to create this using the BL interface. This is just High School Baseball. I have several teams that I photograph, and all have individual galleries for each athlete.
I like that I’m able to manage the content of all my image galleries from Lr. I think the token processing is still a bit more advanced with Lr than Bl.