Usually when it appears Cloud Stop Motion isn't saving your work, it's actually working behind the scenes to ensure your work is safe so that you can carry on where you left off next time you sign in. It is often a slow or unreliable internet connection that causes the illusion of work not being saved.
How does Cloud Stop Motion work?
Cloud Stop Motion works on a similar premise to Google Docs. You make an edit and it instantly saves to the cloud. With Google Docs, the changes are so small in data size that they appear instantaneously saved, whereas with Cloud Stop Motion, as your work is data heavy, you are reliant on your network connection to the internet for this to be uploaded into your dedicated storage area and saved.
Without a failsafe in place, if you were to lose connection or log out before the upload had finished, you would indeed lose all work not already uploaded at that point. However, what happens with our app is that when you take a photo/capture a frame, the image is stored locally within the browser's cache (or temporarily stored within Chrome in the case of Chromebooks). The Cloud Stop Motion app then communicates with its back end to immediately try and upload any new edits/frames as they are made, forming a queue of any additional work/data being created whilst it waits for the first edit/image to complete its upload to the cloud.
When you create lots of edits in one session, these will begin to upload in the background as they should. Due to either a poor wireless connection and/or slow upload speed it may take a while to upload only a small percentage of the data/images before you log off and the upload is complete. This causes the upload of the cached data to pause and wait until the browser is logged back into Cloud Stop Motion again before it automatically resumes. As the remaining work is stored in the browser's cache, nothing has been deleted, which is why the missing work can't be found in any recycle bins but has also not yet been fully uploaded to the cloud.
There are two key signs which will advise if a project is still saving/uploading that are immediately visible on your screen:
- When you are seeing a project which is in a fully uploaded state, you will see a thin yellow horizontal bar (see image below) which spans the page sitting between the top of the frame and the Cloud Stop Motion image/profile icons etc. at the very top. The moment you take a frame, or series of frames, this bar swiftly recedes to the left and returns towards the right to refill the width of the page as the upload completes - it is your visual upload progress indicator.
- The other indicator is a flashing circle with upward pointing arrow icon which replaces the profile icon in the top right of the screen (see image below) which shows both the yellow progress bar and arrow icon (currently greyed out where it is mid-flash):
This solution was made for Cloud Stop Motion version 2.00.58. We hope it helped. If you have any further questions or queries about Cloud Stop Motion or just want to provide some feedback, leave us a message at animate@cloudstopmotion.com and we'll get back to you as soon as we can!