What a browser can do with a folder of photos
A desktop upscaler owns the machine while it runs. A browser tab is a guest: it can be put to sleep, have its storage cleared, be slowed down when it is out of sight, and on a phone be closed by the system without asking. None of that is a reason not to do the work in a tab — it is the reason the queue here is built the way it is.
1. The tab can be thrown away
Browsers reclaim memory from tabs nobody is looking at. On a laptop with plenty of memory that is rare; on a phone it is routine. A queue that keeps everything in memory loses everything when that happens.
The queue keeps a small run record in this browser’s storage — the settings, the file list with names, sizes and dimensions, each file’s state — and no picture data in it at all. Each finished file is written as it finishes to the browser’s private file area, so a reopened tab can offer to resume and skip the files already done. The browser asks for the folder again on resume, because a web page is not allowed to keep a folder open across visits; the queue warns about that before it asks.
2. Storage has a quota
That private file area is real disk, and every browser caps how much of it a site may use. When the cap is reached, or in a private window where it may not exist at all, the queue carries on in memory and says once that a reload would lose the progress. Starting a new run clears the last run’s staged files, and a run left untouched for seven days is purged with its files. The privacy page has a button that clears all of it immediately.
3. A warm laptop slows down
Every pass here runs on the processor. Twenty minutes in, a thin laptop is hot, and its firmware lowers the clock speed to protect itself; a tab moved to the background is slowed by the browser too. A measurement taken in the first two seconds cannot see either.
That is why the estimate is a range rather than a number, why the queue offers a background pace that rests between files, and why the run report in every archive prints the quoted range next to the time the run really took. You can time your own device before choosing a single file.
4. Phones and tablets have lower ceilings
| Desktop | iPhone and iPad | |
|---|---|---|
| Worked on a reduced copy above | 32 MP | 16 MP |
| Excluded above | 100 MP | 40 MP |
| Largest file | 120 MB | 120 MB |
On iOS the queue’s envelope halves as well and 500 files is not offered. That is inferred from the platform’s known canvas limits rather than measured on every device, and the envelope page says so.
And the two lines that are policy
A file estimated at more than 5 minutes goes through the arithmetic path instead of a model, and a queue estimated at more than 4 hours does not start. Neither is a limit of the machine; both are where a job stops being one a tab should be trusted with.
What this means in practice
- Keep the tab in front for the fastest run; choose the background pace if you need the machine for something else.
- On a phone, run small sets and smaller factors, or move the folder to a laptop.
- If a run is interrupted, reopen the same page: the queue offers to resume and keeps the files it already finished.
Related
- Where the minutes come fromTile geometry read off both graphs, the per-pass figures, and the calibration that replaces them.
- Runs, warns, refusedThree bands, two thresholds, the halved iOS envelope and the arithmetic floor beneath all of it.
- Bulk image upscalerA folder in, one archive out — with the wait measured on this machine before it starts.
- The 972-tile calculationOne twelve-megapixel photograph, counted tile by tile, and what a GPU changes about it.