Using the File Menu: Bulk Upload (L$10 per file)...

File Menu: Bulk Upload (L$10 per file)...

Can someone please explain to me what this means and how it works?

1. Is this a cheaper way to load files?
2. What is the technical ramifications?
3. What rules apply?

Anyhting else I can't think of...pitfalls and perils

Some people think it does not work.

Thanks as always in advance.

This is a convenience feature.

Use it when you have a lot of items to upload at once. You select a bunch of files and they get uploaded in sequence. If you do it the regular way you have a lot of clicking to do - this just saves a number of clicks.

It still costs L$10 to upload each file - no bulk discounts, unfortunately

Nope. It's just a faster way to upload multiple files, rather than doing them each one at a time.


Ramifications? I'm not sure what you're asking. Ramifications are consequences. The only consequences of uploading a bunch of files are that each one costs you $10L, and then you have the files (images, sounds, or animations) in your inventory. That's it.

If you meant technical specifications, well, you can upload images, sounds, and animations at the following specs:





As already stated, each file costs you L$10 to upload, and they must be TGA, BMP, JPEG, WAV, or BVH. Beyond that, the only "rules" are the same that apply to selecting multiple files in any other application (ctrl-click, shift-click, that sort of thing).

Bulk Upload works; I use it all the time. It's identical regular uploading except for one thing: you can't use the preview function with it. But that's it.

Two gotchas;

If an upload fails (because you accidentally selected a file that SL can't handle) the bulk upload terminates. So you can start a mass upload, go get a coffee, and return to find only 2 files were transfered.

If you realize as the image start appearing that's somethings wrong and you want to cancel, the only way I can see to do this is close the client. Granted, I wanted to stop things quickly and didn't have a lesurely look around. (I found after starting an upload I hadn't used the correct alpha channel to maake by TGAs and was uploading 100% blank textures!)

This is great everyonr, thanks a million Lindens!

One more clarification:

Chosen Few "Canvas height and width must each be one of the following numbers: 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, or 2048."

The canvases do not have to square, correct? They can be rectangles, as long as they have one side that is the required dimension?

Thanks again.

The canvases don't have to be square. But BOTH dimensions have to be supported, or else SL will resize the image. So you indeed want to resize both dimensions. In many image editing programs, you'll have to find a box titled something like "preserve aspect ratio" and uncheck it.

Now, you may think, won't resizing my image that doesn't have an aspect ratio of (1:1, 2:1, etc.) distort it? If you view the image as a texture, yes. But to get back to the correct shape, create a prim with the right aspect ratio and put the texture on that -- voila, it looks right again!

To keep the math simple, I just turn the original pixel counts (from the image BEFORE I resized it in Photoshop) into prim dimensions. For instance, if I have an image that is 300 x 721 pixels, I make a prim that is 3.00 meters by 7.21 meters. Since that probably isn't the size I ultimately want, I then use Stretch (dragging one of the corner handles) to get the prim to the size I want. If the image is going to be part of a larger object where exact dimensions matter, I'll get out the calculator and figure them out, possibly accepting a small amount of image distortiion to get convenient dimensions.

By the way, I would probably resize that example image to 256x512 pixels; that would be a good compromise of image size and detail preservation.

Wandering off topic but -- put the original image dimensions in the filename! Since the textures names are named based off that it's right there for you!

Saved myself a ton of aggrevation since I started that.

I use bulk upload a lot.

When you upload one image at a time, you have a few advantages.
- You can preview the image before committing to spending the L$10 for the upload. Handy if you failed to make an alpha channel, or saved something that should have alpha transparency in 24-bit tga instead of 32-bit. Also handy if you forgot to turn off a template layer or two.
- You can enter actual descriptions in the description field. (In bulk uploads, the file name ends up in the texture name and the description fields.)
- You can change the file name to something other than the original filename with the ".tga' stripped off the end.

Best way to use bulk upload is to put the files you want into a single folder before you do the bulk upload. This makes selecting the batch of files easier. Make sure all the files are in the correct format and with the correct layers showing before you start.

When you load multiple images in bulk:
- You have far less clicking to do.
- It's faster.
- You can pretty much ignore it as it uploads.

I like to rename files *before* uploading. I have a regexp renaming script, workflow automation, and even good-old rightclick/rename... all of which are a lot more responsive than renaming in SL.

I prefix any texture I upload with nn_. I use nn_o if it's somehting I made and have rights to, and _lb, _ub, _fc, _sk at the end if it's a template file.