Phoca Forum

Hey folks,

just thought I would pop a little "Good News" note here regarding a recent project using Phoca Gallery;

Hosting : US Based Cloud Hosting Account with an Australian domain
Joomla Version : 1.5.20
Template : Custom Built Template from a GavickPro Design
Site Purpose : Photography Online Viewing for Clients (Public Events and Private Photo-Shoot Viewing)

Generally this client has between 10-20 private (registered users, limited access to specific users) Galleries of Wedding, Portrait, Family and Commercial shoot images, containing anywhere from 10 to 200 hi-res images, with one or two public viewing Galleries of local sporting events, normally containing up to 2000 images in multiple directories.

On this particular occasion, the photographic team were shooting a National Junior Rugby Tournament over three days with around 80 teams competing, resulting in over ** 18,000 ** images being taken and displayed on the website for public viewing and ordering (non-eCommerce, this is purely a viewing site)

The images were uploaded via FTP, 3 main categories (one for each day), then 5-10 sub-categories (Age-Group) in each day and then by game, resulting in a total of 40 categories and sub-categories.

Image Pre-Processing took about 18 hours, FTP Upload took about 12 hours, auto-magic thumb-nailing took about 16 hours.


No major issues were observed, about 90% of the work was completed by the customer, with small parts of assistance from myself along the way.

A few things we did observe...

Obviously, 18,000 images being processed via a web-interface was no small undertaking and it certainly pushed MySQL, Joomla! & Phoca Gallery somewhat. But on the whole everything stood up well with a slightly reduced performance capability due to File-System read times and MySQL Query times.

1) When listing images in Phoca Gallery -
Would be nice to maybe have the option to disable "Full" image retrieval when entering the images section and display none, until we selected a category to list or do MySQL read Queries in batches (per page maybe, via Ajax?) We did observe timeouts occasionally when first entering this page due to the enormously high number of image records being retrieved from MySQL. (This was a mixture of PHP processes crashing occasionally, or PHP timeouts or MySQL thread timeouts and is to be expected in this particular case, so no complaints)

2) Bad FTP image upload, corrupt image -
Would be nice to have an option to continue on with Thumb-nailing and just present a list of corrupt images at the end of the process, if possible. Again, with such a nigh number of images, we had a few that were corrupted either by light-frame in preprocessing or via FTP upload, and this just stopped the thumb-nail process, which added time and a little difficulty to the work-flow. However, again, this is not so much of a complaint as an observation, based on the fact that our situation maybe considered to be abnormal or excessive to Phoca Galleries initial specifications.
EDIT: by me...
Note: I have already discussed this with Jan previously, ( viewtopic.php?f=1&t=9462&p=38550#p38550 ) and is not a Phoca function or issue.

3) Spaces in FileSystem Folder Names -
Again, this is not a complaint, just something we noticed was a little funky and caused a little bit of an issue after initial thumb-nailing, when we had to go back a fix a few mistakes that were made by the photographic web-team.

Our folder structure was similar to this;

- Rugby Tournament 2010
-- Monday
----U13
-----BNE-vs-PNG
-----SCR-vs-GCT
-- Tuesday
----U13
-----TBY-vs-NPO
-----BOL-vs-GCR
....etc etc etc

We didn't manually make Categories, we relied on the thumb-nail process to do this for us with the folder structure.
When we initially thumb-nailed, we opened "Multiple-Add" selected the Top-Level Folder "Rugby Tournament 2010" Notice the spaces, in the name and selected save... Thumb-nailing and category creation worked extremely well, as always.

However, we found that the team had placed some wrong photo's in a few directories and had missed one game, so we needed to go back and work only on those categories, in the "Multiple Add" option, we found we could no-longer traverse the folder/directory tree because of the spaces in the top-level folders name.

To resolve this, we chose to make new folders above the "Rugby Tournament 2010" folder;
- Monday
----U13
-----BNE-vs-PNG
- Tuesday
--- U12
----- BHS-vs-XCF

As edit the appropriate category to now use this folder as it structure, upload/move the images to these new locations and re-thumb-nail (deleting the old image entries for this category if necessary first) and this worked just fine for us and got around the Directory name "spaces" issue.

Phoca Team, a job well done, your gallery component worked as expected and beyond expectations. with very few, if any real issues for what I would consider to be a slightly excessive use. Thank you and congratulations.

Hi,

1) did you try to enable pagination thumbnail creating - see:
https://www.phoca.cz/documents/2-phoca-g ... -menu-item

2) The thumbnail proccess is mostly stopped by e.g. Fatal error, etc. so in fact the script will stop working, this is why there is no mechanism to e.g. working agian and somewhere store the not created images. E.g. if fatal error stop the script, it is not possible to save the image name somewhere, because the script was stopped before. Fatal errors cannot be managed in PHP

3) Yes spaces, diacritics, etc. in filenames is common problem, it is a problem of used system, so Phoca Gallery work with the following rule. Check this before some serve will have problems with spaces and diacritics and will not return any error, etc. Yes you right with the name (if this will be changed, it is not more the same as not changed - but it is really hard to change this behaviour, because if you will change it, then you cannot compare the category name again, if you will set that the spaces and diacritics will be possible to inlcude them in file or folder name, then you get problems on servers which don't work with such feature, etc. )

Jan

Hi Jan

thanks for the post, as I said previously, none of my points were complaints, the component performed brilliantly and is a credit to yourself.

As for point 1), I think maybe I haven't explained myself well. With this many images, we did actually want it to auto-thumbnail all at the same time, not page-by-page, and thumb-nailing ran perfectly with no issues at all, completing all 18K images with only a few restarts, mostly due to bad images (maybe 5 in total).

What I was suggesting, is that with this many images, the component has a lot of work to do when users first select "Images" to simply list all of the images, even when the "Limit" is set to say 25, queries are still made for all the images so as to list how many pages of images there are. In my case, this was a lot of queries, and took a lot of time, our Cloud resources are more than adequate but an option in the Parameters to choose to not list any images on page entry, but list the categories in the drop-down box only, would have been really useful, but not essential.

Again, congratulations and thank you for your work, I think this is quite a good example of how well Phoca Gallery performs under load and stress on particularly large sites.

Hi,

did actually want it to auto-thumbnail all at the same time

in fact this is not possible in open source solution . Now a lot of servers have problems with creating one image per script (creating 3 thumnails (large, medium, small) from one image per script) so creating more thumbnails at once is in fact a sci-fi (because of server performance)

queries are still made for all the images so as to list how many pages of images there are

Yes, this is a tax for comfort The automatically thumbnail creating search and automatically converts the images to thumbnails, so user does not need to care about this process. There are two important parameters:

- Thumbnail creation - this should be disabled in case, all thumbnails are made. This saves the queries
- Pagination thumbnail creation - this limit the queries - only images limited by pagination will be loaded

but list the categories in the drop-down box only

The pagination was selected instead of category. Because in one category you can have e.g. 200 images and info from all the 200 images needs to be loaded, but in pagination you can set your own value (depends on performance of your server). You will know your server has problem with e.g. 100 images, then you will set pagination to 50 etc.

Thank you for your words.

Jan