How thumbnails are built

Goal: understand what happens to a photo between "uploaded" and "visible with a thumbnail," and where to watch that work happen.

The process queue

FrameCourier doesn't generate thumbnails (or apply watermarks, or embed metadata) inline while you upload — that work is handed off to a background job runner called the process queue. Every uploaded photo enqueues a thumbnail job; depending on the gallery and company settings, it may also enqueue a watermark job and an exif job. Camera RAW files enqueue a raw_extract job first, which produces a preview image before thumbnailing can happen. Every upload also enqueues a job to move the file to cloud storage.

Upload to publish flow Upload photo saved Queue job waits for processing begins Thumbnail (+ watermark, + EXIF if enabled) Publish visible to clients
Each uploaded photo moves from upload to queued job(s) to a finished thumbnail before it can be seen in a published gallery.

Watching it run

While photos in a gallery are still processing, the photo grid polls for status every few seconds and swaps spinners for real thumbnails as jobs complete — you don't need to refresh the page.

To see every job across your account in real time — not just for one gallery — go to Queue in the sidebar. It shows counts of jobs currently processing, pending, and failed, and lets you retry or clear failed jobs.

See The process queue for the full page reference, including what each job status means and how to retry a failed job.

How long does it take?

Jobs are processed automatically in the background. In practice a small upload's thumbnail is usually ready within a minute or two; a very large batch upload can take longer since jobs are handled in turn. Each job is retried automatically if it fails, and is only marked failed after repeated unsuccessful attempts.

If thumbnails never appear and jobs stay "pending" or "failed" in the Queue page for an extended period, contact support — there may be a processing delay on our side.

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