I need to convert an experiment with a large number of resource files (~3500 potential stimuli) to online since our labs are currently shut down due to the pandemic. Downloading that number of resources is far too time intensive (it took me 15 min), though, and I was wondering whether there is a way I can speed up the resource download (e.g., zip files). I tried to zip the folder with the images, but it then could not find the stimulus.
I’m not familiar with js at all, so I’m wondering whether there is a way I can use compressed folders for speeding the download and then unpack them using code, maybe?
Hey @cmcfeaters and @Joyce_Tam, apologies for the late response! Having to wait for 3500 images to download before launching into the study sounds frustrating no doubt.
While we do our best to keep Pavlovia’s infrastructure well tuned to serve media resources as fast as possible and impose no limits on the number of resources hosted or served, unfortunately no browser is capable of unzipping anything.
That said, you could try dynamically loading resources as the experiment rolls out instead of having them load in bulk at the beginning. Our manual has more details below,
I did try to do it the way @sotiri suggested but was unsuccessful. I tried to load participant-specific .csv files at the start and then have only the resources in those files load on the fly, but that did not work for me. It was a few months ago, so I cannot remember exactly what my errors were, but I ended up just pre-generating a random subset of my stimuli that participants and just randomized that pre-generated subset (so all participants saw the same random subset but in a random order) for each person so to keep the download time manageable.