Multiple Add and Thumbnails

[trinkel]

Hi again,

Just wanted to get a little more information on importing category trees through Multiple Add and on how thumbnails are created.

I have copied a large image gallery to my server which has several levels of sub folders (several competitions with 20 family folders inside each competition). There are a lot of images (maybe 15000?). I had some error during the import, I think I was trying to do too much at once. I think they had more to do with setting up the categories and stuff rather than the creation of thumbnails. I have increased PHP memory to 122MB and execution time to 120 seconds. That seems to help as some of the images are rather large for camera images.

Now the questions:

• I know a lot of this is based on the php.ini settings, but is there a "practical" limit to the depth of folders and/or number of images that one can import at the same time through Multiple Add?
• Should all thumbnails be created during a Multiple Add (assuming thumbnail creation is turned on)?
• All the categories are set up, the images exist, but the thumbnails don't exist. Is there a quick way to force the creation of thumbnails without visiting each page of the admin/thumbnails list?
• Is there a quick way to remove the images and categories without visiting and manually deleting the images and then the category?
• Could the errors during the Multiple Add have come from the fact that there were periods in the directory names?
• From the FAQ/documentation, it sounds like it isn't a good idea to leave the Thumbnail Cleanup option on due to overhead. Is this interpretation wrong? Is it actually a good idea to leave Thumbnail Cleanup on if Thumbnail Creation is on?

I think that's it.

Thanks,

T.

[Jan]

Hi,

1) depends on your server. The problem of categories is, it is a tree and you need to load them all from database, because you need to do a tree, it is not like by images where the full pagination works So yes, thumbnail creation is not a problem because in one script only one image is made (3 thumbnails), the problem is getting info about categories which cannot be paginated

2) no problem there, if you will enable pagination thumbnail creating and set pagination to e.g. 100, then only 100 items will be checked to see if the thumbnails are created or not (so no problem with database)

3) because of performace, if there are a lot of images, so it is better to paginate and go to every page to create e.g. thumbnails per 100 images. I know this can take a lot of time but if there are so many image, you cannot do thumbnails at once because the server will be not able to do

4) what you mean with periods - names of images and folders should't contain bad characters and empty spaces because some servers have problems with this

5) Thumbnail Cleanup should be enabled only in case your server has a lot of memory. This function can help you to clean not used thumbnails on one site, but on other site it is very demand on performance because if looks after every file (image) on your server and file searching takes a lot of performance.

Jan