MobileMe sync problems

Question

I've created a couple MobileMe galleries in Aperture, and I'm finding that the syncing process is a bit odd. It seems to always upload more images than I have actually added. For example, I have one gallery that had 14 images and had already been synced the week before. I opened Aperture, added one image to that gallery and clicked the little sync "button". Looking at the activity window, it said it was uploading "1 of 4" images, and (as always) it took a lot longer than it should have. (The first time I published the gallery, with less than 10 images, it took over an hour. I could have manually built the HTML for a basic gallery, scaled several versions of the images and uploaded to my other site via FTP in that same amount of time.)
Anybody know if there is anything to be done about this? Or is this just how it is?

Answer 1

JPEGs are usually pretty small (that's the whole point of using JPEG is how great they can compress the size). But you've got me confused in your description of your upload. I thought in your first post (while I'm typing my reply it doesn't show me your first message) you said you had previously published some pictures to a gallery and now you are adding just 1 photo but notice that it is uploading 4 photos.
It might make more sense to you if you have a peek at what it's actually uploaded. Try this:
In Finder, open your iDisk (if it's not on your desktop or in the left margin of the Finder window you can click, from the Finder main menu: Go -> iDisk -> My iDisk (or click shiftcommandI).
Once in your iDisk, navigate to: Web -> Sites -> _gallery
You should see one or more folders whose names are just six-digit numbers (e.g. 100123). Each of these folders is a gallery you chose to publish/share via either Aperture or iPhoto. Pick any of them and open it. Inside you'll see more folders except each folder is named for a file you uploaded as part of the gallery. In other words if you had a file named IMG_1234.jpg you will instead see a folder named IMG_1234 (not .jpg extension). Open the folder and notice that inside you have several files. In the random folder I just happened to open on my own iDisk I have four files (remember you said you uploaded 1 file and it actually uploaded 4!) and they are named things like 'medium.jpg', 'msquare'.jpg, 'square.jpg', and 'web.jpg'. These are all the same image, but they've been sized or cropped differently for purposes of the various gallery layouts, thumbnails, web-viewing size, and/or larger sizes you might choose to make available if you allow visitors to download your photos.
Each 1 photo you upload in a gallery is converted into all these various sizes before uploading to your MobileMe gallery. The actual number and sizes are based on the options you chose when you published the album to your gallery.
I agree that the upload performance is slow -- but having used MobileMe (.Mac) for years, it's been my experience that they were never particularly fast. Regardless of how fast your own computer, software, or internet connection may be. I don't think the upload speed has much to do with Aperture itself -- I think it's a server side issue.