General Fusking

For questions about what Fusking is, how to protect your image content, or stop hot-linking to your webpages refer to the information on the Fusking tab on the navigation bar above.

Fusking with Image Surfer Pro

Question:
Will Image Surfer Pro let me search for images of specific content on the Internet?

Answer:
While the Registered Edition of Image Surfer Pro will let you manually configure any fusking sequence you may wish to search the web with, this is not the intended purpose of Image Surfer Pro.

Question:
If not to search for media - what is Image Surfer Pro fusking for?

Answer:
Image Surfer Pro is all about collecting links to media files. When you find an media source you like and add it to your fusker collection, Image Surfer Pro will fusk to look for similar content in the same relative location on the Internet to add them as well. You may also add all of the media directly referenced by a page instantly or even use an ISP Form to search hundreds of linked pages for media content. This keeps you from having to individually add each link to a fusker collection when there may be many files in the same set specifically named to highlight their relationship.

Question:
When I use to add a URL to my fusker collection, Image Surfer Pro will look for similar files in a numeric sequence - why not a List String sequence?

Answer:
Finding a numeric sequence is relatively straight forward, deciding where and what portion of a text string to randomly start iterating across would likely generate a lot of server 404 and 403 errors - constituting a denial of service attack for which your IP address may become blocked.

Question:
If the names of the files I wish to access are not numerically sequential or easily fusked, can I still add them to my fusker collection?

Answer: Sure! There are a couple of options. In either case, viewing the fusker collection will show you each of the files in the order they are added to the fusker collection.

1. Use at the FHG level to instantly add the media file references from the page to your fusker collection.
2. Use to generate a fusker collection form and select the media URLs you wish to add to the fusker collection
3. Use [Copy Image URL] and the URL Capture Bar to add the links from the pages
4. Change the user configuration to not auto add numerical sequences, then add each image individually
5. Manually add file names to a list fusked segment or build the references manually

Question:
What is the maximum size fusker collection I can build?

Answer:
Essentially there is no limit. Fusker Collection files referencing hundreds of thousands of images have been built and tested (Largest we've heard of is over 1.5 Million Images!). If you are using the Free Edition of Image Surfer Pro this will be more difficult as you will have to continually close and re-open Internet Explorer. With the Registered Edition, it is quite common to build very large fusker collections or to merge several large fusker collection files.

Question:
When should I use a fusked file vs. individual files?

Answer:
This is a matter of taste. Currently, visualization files do not break up or produce an index to the individual files of a fusked file - so if you use a fusked file, you will not be able to visualize the individual files represented by the fusk. However, it may be that you can add many more files to your fusker collection much more quickly using the fusk or you may want to always see the related files in a group. The decision may be different for different media types. Fusked videos for instance use a common poster image as the initial video overlay and frames and pages use a common text description on guide pages.

Question:
The files I wish to add are in individual sequences which can easily be fusked at a directory level, but each sequence has a different number of files below the directory... what should I do?

Answer:
This is primarily a matter of taste. If you use fusks at the directory level, you can add the images much more quickly - however, the visualization files will have missing file blocks when a sequence doesn't have that specific file. We would recommend adding the directory fusk, displaying all of the content in a visualization, then delete the fusked directory and use a directed search of the visualization page to re-add the content in individual directories (unselecting the missing files). If the number of files referenced is very large you may need to use a guided view and a directed search, but would then need to clean up each sequence individually.

Question:
When I build a fusker collection, should I care about the missing file links?

Answer:
In short yes. Fusker collections that reference files that are either protected or which don't exist will cause 404 and/or 403 server errors on the hosting webservers. Constant errors of this sort from a single IP Address may lead to your IP address being blocked by the hosting server. Please refer to the Remove Missing File References tutorial for a better understanding of how to remove these references from your fusker collection.

Question:
I've tried to add an image to my fusker collection with but the file added looks like a .htm or .html file and doesn't display as an image?

Answer:
It sounds like you are adding a webpage which had the image on it rather than the image itself. Use [Copy Image URL] and the URL Capture Bar to get the URL of the specific image and add it to your fusker collection.

Question:
The webpages I'm viewing have a single video and several thumbnail images that link to pages with larger versions of the thumbnail images on them. When I use the to process the page, the video is added but none of the larger images. How can I add them all?

Answer:
What is happening is the video element is clearly referenced on the page but the thumbnail images are linking to more webpages rather than directly to the larger images, so the button is only adding the media found directly through the initial webpage (i.e. the video). The larger images can only be found on the additional pages. You could either add those images separately or use the button to create and ISP Form and choose to search the pages linked to by the thumbnail pages.

Videos

Question:
The page I'm viewing clearly has a video playing, but when I use the button, I'm told Image Surfer Pro found no media references?

Answer:
While Image Surfer Pro supports nearly every video construct we have fond on the web, there are three ways of displaying video on a webpage which we can not support due.

In some cases the video is referenced as a Blob. These blocks of raw binary data are often streams of data from the internet and are not accessible as static files or URLs. Because of this, Image Surfer Pro has no way of referencing the video data.

In some cases the video is being played by and active object (such as a Shockwave Flash file), but the actual source of the video is configured within another file. This can be the case if the video Play List for instance is held in an XML configuration file. Image Surfer Pro may not have access to that file to find the actual source URL or can not read the format of the file. Because active objects or unique, it has been impossible to determine every possible way video can be accessed by them. We hope the release of HTML5 and will help move the entire web to a more standardized approach to providing video.

We have found Shockwave Flash active objects which are configured with a parameter such as BasePath. The value of this parameter is then used along with the relative video source URL to form a fully qualified video URL which Image Surfer Pro could support. But the issue is how the two pieces of the URL are configured is not consistent from site to site. The names of the parameters and how to treat the so called BasePath differ from player to player.

Try using the button to create and ISP Form to determine what type of media is displaying the video. You may also be able to right click on the video and chose the Copy Embed Code of the video - the URL Capture Bar supports processing this code in most cases and can add the video to your fusker collection this way. In some cases it may be necessary to use the built-in debugging tools of Internet Explorer to parse the HTML manually to determine the best video source URL and try adding it through teh URL Capture Bar.

Question:
I have added several videos into a fusked video segment. When I visualize the videos they all look like the same video until I click play on them?

Answer:
When a video is drawn on a webpage by Internet Explorer, it places the Poster Image associated with the video over the video until the video is played. In Image Surfer Pro, each video segment has a single poster image, so for a fusked video segment, the same poster image will be used by Internet Explorer to initially display each of the videos. If you wish to have different poster images for each of the videos, they must be added as single video segments in the fusker collection. Try turning off the {Auto combine individual Videos into fusked Videos} configuration on the Videos Tab of the user preferences.

Question:
I like to collect frame videos from a specific Tube site, but all the videos clump into a single fusked frame segment and trying to view the segment takes a long time for the page to render or Internet Explorer becomes unresponsive...

Answer:
It is common of Tube sites to provide embed code which references a single path with a unique identifier in the URL path for each video. If you have the {Auto combine individual Frames into fusked Frames} enabled on the Frames Tab of the user preferences this will cause all of the frame videos from the Tube site to group into a single list fusked frame segment. Displaying a large number of high resolution frame videos at once may cause Internet Explorer to run out of memory or begin page swapping to the hard drive which would cause it to become unstable and unresponsive. Try disabling this configuration and rebuilding the fusker collection such that the videos are not all grouped into a single frame segment. Then view the segments individually. By changing the order of the segments with the Segment Organizer and turning the grouping configuration on and off you can make clusters of related videos.

Viewing My Fusker Collection

Question:
When I try to view a lot of very large images or several videos on a single page, not all of them display or Internet Explorer seems to hang - what causes this?

Answer:
The most common answer is the computer you are using is running out of memory. This often leads to swapping physical memory with virtual memory on disk drives and can greatly slow down your system performance. On 32Bit machines Internet Explorer is limited to a total of 2Gig of memory for all open pages. If this is the issue, try restricting the number of items displayed on a single page.

In some cases content delivery networks balk at opening too many streams to a single IP Address at the same time. If this is the case all of the videos may work individually but can not be displayed on a single page. Depending upon how your fusker collection is structured you may need to try a different visualization method or limit the number of items visible on a single page to the number of videos which did work for you.

Question:
Occasionally the files I've added to my fusker collection don't show up even though I know the URL is correct?

Answer:
This will happen if the domain provider where the content is hosted on the Internet has blocked hot-link access to the image or video. It can also happen if the file was a Frame or Page element and the host has blocked the display of the content in a Frame. There is nothing Image Surfer Pro can do to correct this - we suggest you contact the domain provider about the blocked content (they may have done it by accident).

Question:
A fusker collection I built previously displayed the content, but now the content is all gone or has changed to something I didn't want in my fusker collection. What's wrong?

Answer:
Image Surfer Pro fusker collection files are fusker collections of URL references to media data on the Internet. Like any URL reference (such as Internet Explorer's "favorites"), these references may become invalid at any time at the sole discretion of who is hosting the content. If the file is changed, or access to the file is changed, the URL reference may no longer access the file, or may access a file with different content.

Windows & IE General

Question:
When I upgraded Windows or Internet Explorer I told it to save my windows settings. Now the Image Surfer Pro button is visible in the desktop version of IE but doesn't do anything when I click it...

Answer:
While the majority of the registry settings utilized by Image Surfer Pro are preserved, the registry settings which tell the new instance of Internet Explorer to re-link with extension bars is not set - so the link between Internet Explorer and Image Surfer Pro is broken. You will need to uninstall Image Surfer Pro and then re-install it. Image Surfer Pro will then be accessible and your user preferences will be unaffected.

Windows10 & IE11

Question:
I enabled Enhanced Protection Mode in the Advanced Internet Options and now Image Surfer Pro seems to operate but never shows any of the image pages - what happened?

Answer:
It would seem you have not fully upgraded Windows and Internet Explorer. Please upgrade both to assure you have the latest versions. You will likely have to uninstall and re-install Image Surfer Pro after these upgrades, but it should then work with Enhanced Protected Mode enabled. For reference these were the versions of Windows and IE running when the 3.2 release was made and compatibility was confirmed:

Windows: Version 10.0.15063 Build 15063
Internet Explorer: Version 11.674.5063.0 Update Versions: 11.0.47 (KB4040685)

Question:
When I click on the "E" icon in the task bar I don't see any of my previously installed extensions including Image Surfer Pro - why not?

Answer:
Windows10 installs the new Edge browser as the default browser. The little "E" in the task bar is for the Edge browser (yes this looks confusing to us too...). To use Image Surfer Pro and your other Internet Explorer tools you need to run IE11. Search for "Internet Explorer" in the system search or through Cortana. We suggest for ease of use to pin IE to the task bar right next to the Edge icon.

There are rumors that Edge will eventually support add-ons, and if so we will make an effort to port Image Surfer Pro to Edge at some point in the future.

Question:
Sometimes when I'm surfing I'll suddenly notice that the Image Surfer Pro collection tree I've been building no longer has any information in it! Where did it go?

Answer:
Starting with IE10 Microsoft made a change to the way they cache website data to make it appear as if the browser was super fast at rendering pages. In fact they cache the window by creating a new browser window and putting it in place of the one you were using between websites. Then if you move back in the browsing history they simply display the old window "instantly". While this has some advantages, it has several disadvantages...

The Image Surfer Pro instance associated with the IE browser window is also "cached" as it is a subwindow of the browser window. A new Image Surfer Pro instance is created and displayed with the new browser window. When this happens, if you notice it right away you can browse back (use the backspace key or back arrow at the top of IE) and the collection data will magically re-appear! We do suggest saving your collection after major changes so that you don't inadvertently lose the information in an orphaned cached window. Then you can simply use the "Recent File" list to retrieve the collection when you see it missing.

This issue still exists in IE11 but seems to be getting less and less frequent.

Windows8 & IE10

Question:
When I click on the Internet Explorer Tile from the start page I don't see any way to use Image Surfer Pro?

Answer:
Accessing IE this way utilizes the Metro interface to Internet Explorer. This version of IE does not support any extensions. Unfortunately this includes Image Surfer Pro as well as all other extension bars, toolbars, and command buttons.

To access Image Surfer Pro and your other IE extensions use Internet Explorer from within the Desktop area of Windows8.