Workaround: Compressed Photo Upload for Slow Connections
Been running into this one on rural job sites where cell coverage is spotty at best. When you're trying to upload photos from a completed job and the progress bar just sits there spinning, this workaround's saved me more than a few times.
Summary: Manually compress photos on your device before uploading to FieldPulse when you're on a weak or metered connection.
Symptoms you'll see:
- Photo upload stuck at 0% or timing out repeatedly
- "Upload failed" errors after multiple retries
- App draining battery trying to retry failed uploads
- Other sync tasks blocked behind photo uploads
Why this happens: FieldPulse mobile captures full-resolution images (which is usually what you want for documentation), but on 2-3 bar LTE or flaky site WiFi, a 4-6MB photo times out before it completes. The app doesn't auto-compress — it just keeps retrying the same large file.
Workaround:
1. Before you start your jobs for the day, open your phone's camera settings and temporarily switch to a lower resolution or "medium quality" mode. On iPhone: Settings > Camera > Formats > High Efficiency (already default) but also check that you're not in ProRAW. On Android: Camera app > Settings > Photo quality > Medium.
2. Pro tip: If you've already taken high-res photos and need to get them uploaded now, use your phone's built-in image editor to crop slightly (even 10% off edges) — most phones save the edited version as a new compressed file.
3. For iOS: Open photo > Edit > Crop > adjust slightly > Save as New Photo. Upload that version.
4. For Android: Gallery > Edit > Crop > Save Copy. The copy is usually 30-50% smaller.
5. Alternative if you've got tons of photos: Use a compression app like Image Size (iOS) or Photo & Picture Resizer (Android) to batch-shrink images to ~1200px width before upload. Still plenty clear for documentation purposes.
Important caveats: This is a workaround, not a fix. You're trading image quality for upload reliability. If you need original resolution for insurance claims or warranty documentation, mark those specific photos and re-upload later on WiFi. Don't use this for photo evidence you might need to zoom way into later.
What FieldPulse says: This is a known limitation — see Photos Upload Slowly on Weak or Spotty Connections for the official issue. Engineering has discussed auto-compression but it's not on the near-term roadmap from what I can tell.
If anyone's found a better workflow for this, especially on Android, I'm all ears. The built-in editors vary a lot by manufacturer.
Hi Josh, thanks for sharing this with the community! Just a heads up that we've filed this feedback with the product team — auto-compression for constrained connections is on the backlog for Q4 review. In the meantime, for teams using this workaround at scale, I'd recommend documenting which photo quality setting your org standardizes on so field staff aren't guessing. Happy to help if anyone needs assistance configuring device profiles through your MDM.
I can confirm this behavior on iOS 17.6.1 with FieldPulse 3.2.4. I have reproduced the upload timeout on connections below ~1Mbps upstream. One clarification: the built-in iOS crop method you described creates a new photo but keeps the original, so storage usage increases — worth noting for devices with limited capacity. We implemented an interim policy using Shortcuts app to auto-resize on a shared album before field staff access it. Not perfect but reduces failure rate significantly.
yo this is clutch. im on verizon but half our sites are basically dead zones. the crop trick works good on my samsung — saves like 60% file size usually.
