The Eternal Spinner

Someone in Barcelona just picked ten photos off their camera roll and clicked Process All. The spinner appears. It spins. Four photos in, the server hits its ten-second limit and quits. Now the user is staring at an error message, half their photos captioned and half not, with no way to tell which is which. So they do the natural thing and click Process All again. Some photos get captioned twice, the rest still fail, and the spinner is still spinning.

Streaming doesn’t help here. You built photo processing back in Lesson 13, where it worked fine one or two photos at a time. In Lesson 10, streaming fixed the text generation timeout because an AI itinerary is a continuous flow of text, you can send it word by word as it’s produced. But photo processing isn’t a stream. It’s batch work. You need to resize a file, send it to an AI, wait for a response, save the result. Each photo is a discrete chunk of work. You can’t “stream” a photo resize.

This is the eternal spinner, batch edition. And it needs a completely different solution than streaming.