[ansel] Thumbnail generation for gallery uploaded via publish this photo to the web.

gimili gimili17 at gmail.com
Mon Nov 17 20:05:06 UTC 2008


Michael Rubinsky wrote:
>
> Quoting gimili <gimili17 at gmail.com>:
>
>> Jan Schneider wrote:
>>> Zitat von gimili <gimili17 at gmail.com>:
>>>> Would it be possible to have a cron job that created the thumbnails 
>>>> for a large gallery that was uploaded via web publish or perhaps a 
>>>> button that ran a script?  This seems like it might be simple and 
>>>> perhaps people would find it useful?  It is so easy to get a large 
>>>> amount of photos into ansel via web publish but then it was slow to 
>>>> move through the pages as I had to wait for the thumbnails to be 
>>>> generated for the first time.  Once they are generated it is almost 
>>>> instantaneous.  Not that big a deal but just a thought.  This is a 
>>>> really great module!  Thanks!
>>> Why would a cron job help in that case? You'd still have to wait, 
>>> but this time for the cron job, not for the page to load.
>> Quite true Jan.  I would have to wait but cron job happens without me 
>> having to do anything.  Currently I have to move through each page 
>> myself to force generation and this takes some time (perhaps there is 
>> already a better way that I am not aware of?).  It took 20 seconds 
>> per page with 2,400kb photos.  With cron I could upload the large 
>> gallery (I still can't believe how well this works) and know that in 
>> the evening the thumbnails would be generated so that the next day my 
>> user, who always complains about speed, would not have to wait as she 
>> switches from page to page in the gallery for thumbnail generation.
>
> ...but then that means that "your user" would have to wait until the 
> next day, after the cron job has run.
I got that :-)
>   There is also nothing preventing someone from visiting your gallery, 
> thus generating the thumbnails anyway. 
The gallery is for one particular user who won't access them until I 
email the link.  Therefore myself or the user will generate the thumbs.  
It won't be anybody else.

> There is an option to auto-generate thumbnails on upload, but this is 
> purposefully turned off for the xp publish feature to avoid 
> overloading the server since there is no limit on the number of photos 
> that can be uploaded at once via that method.
That makes a lot of sense.
> Image generation is fairly resource intensive, spreading it out in 
> groups of 9 images (or whatever your images-per-page setting is) helps 
> spread out the load.  That being said, 20 seconds seems a bit 
> excessive, but that, of course, depends on lots of factors, server 
> hardware/memory, image toolkit being used etc...
Speed is only a problem when images are kept at high quality.  The 
images are being used in print material and need to be at higher than 
normal quality.
>
> Running a cron job isn't a horrible idea, but that comes with it's own 
> set of performance issues since it would be checking every user's 
> galleries for un-processed images and processing them and *that* would 
> be seriously resource intensive for anything but the simplest 
> installations...then there is the question of what style should the 
> thumbnails be auto generated for....etc...
I see.
>
>> There is already an option for auto-generation for pictures uploaded 
>> via the ansel interface but this is not available for the web publish 
>> option.  Maybe there is another way to trigger it besides cron.  A 
>> button that generates all the thumbnails for the gallery would help.
> If your having so much issues with one page in your gallery, I'm not 
> sure that generating an entire gallery's worth during a single request 
> would be the answer. I'd be against this being available for all users 
> since it has the potential to affect server performance.
That makes sense.  I guess I will just click through all the pages and 
generate the thumbnails.  Not the end of the world for sure.
**Thanks again!  Great software**


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