Is there a command line cache utility?

mdhender

I'm hosting on 1&1. Install of Zenphoto 1.1.6. I'm not able to see any pictures. I can see the album structures and navigate the albums, I just don't see any images. Except for the full size image. For an example, see http://ksuchy.com/photos/kms/Thorn/ - there's one picture in the album but no thumbnail. I've checked the cache. It creates cache/kms/Thorn but doesn't put an image in it. I'm assuming that 1&1 is killing the caching process due to CPU, but am not sure. I'd like to run it from the command line and confirm.

** Update ** I tried the cache script from the forums. It doesn't report any errors, but it doesn't produce any thumbnails, either. 1&1 has the memory limit set to 40M. The pictures are all around 3000x2000 pixels, so I'm sure that I'm bumping against the PHP/GD limit. I have imagemagick available. Is there any way that I can create thumbs with it and make zenphoto use them?

Thanks,
Mike

Connie

is there any reason why you present images in that size, 3000 x 2000?

I guess you want your site visitors to open the images in the browser, but who has such a big monitor?

I suggest to strip down the images to a reasonal size, then upload them and check whether the thumbnails are generated

that would help your visitors who must not load so huge masses of data and it could help you to get thumbnails

find out which GD-library version is active at your installation
this can be done as usual with a phpinfo-test-script
it will show you a section "GD" with all information

I find this in the GD Wiki:
"Of course, opening truly huge images can cause real memory problems, if several are open at once. 8,000 pixels times 8,000 pixels times four bytes for truecolor equals a walloping 256 megabytes."
so calculate this with your image size and you will see that you are really bumping ;=)

you might check your installation with some small PHP like 'memory_get_usage', see here:
http://de.php.net/manual/en/function.memory-get-usage.php

acrylian

Mdhender: We have a button on the overview tab within the admin backend to cache all the images in the gallery and also a button on each album edit page to cache only that album. No need for a command line utility...:-)

Connie is right, you images are too big to be processed on your server. Please read her , too: http://www.zenphoto.org/2007/12/troubleshooting-zenphoto/#11.

And sorry, Zenphoto does not support ImageMagick. It's on the list for sometime in the future.

mdhender

@Connie, yes, there is a reason for using such large images.

@acrylian. i'm futzing around in function-images.php/cacheImages. i don't see anything that updates information on the cache entries in the db, so zenphoto uses just the filesystem. can you tell me if that's correct?

if that is true, then i could use imagemagick to create the thumbs and place them in the cache directory.

does zenphoto rely on pulling the image attributes first before deciding which cached images to look for? because if it does, then there's no way to get zenphoto to know that the cached images are available.

Connie

I still wonder what could be the reason for such big images ;=)
are you serving to an intranet with monitors big as walls?

acrylian

@mdhender: Zenphoto stores the images and albums in the db too, but it checks if they match with the file system. For the cached images zenphoto also looks if they are there and if it uses them, if not it tries to create them.

You can create the cached files manually or with ImageMagick but their filenames need to match the settings in the admin.
'image.jpg_90_cw90_ch90.jpg` would be a 90px cropped square thumbnail and 'image.jpg_595.jpg' would be a sized image (the one on image.php) with the admin default of 595px. Best you try a smaller images that get processed (...:-)) to see the exact values/names you need.

mdhender

@acrylian - thanks. i'm catching a definite hint to use smaller images. maybe i could resize the originals and then update the theme to allow a link to the original. that's probably simpler (and more compatible in the long run).

@connie - actually, we have a monitor at work that is about 35 by 20 feet i'm using zenphotos as a proof of concept. if i can get this working, the group that i'm supporting will use it to store photos for a research project. they won't be in JPEG format, but i think that i can work around by converting to JPEG, resizing, then using a link from the theme.

trisweb

Zenphoto can certainly support large images, the problem is that your server can't

For a "research project" I'm sure you could either run the server locally on a decently powerful desktop, or get a good VPS or dedicated server plan that you can set the limits on manually. For those images I'd recommend at least 512MB of memory for the server, and over 150+ made available to PHP through the php.ini setting.

Unfortunately on your current server no image gallery software would be able to resize images of that size.

But, your other plan sounds good too since the theme is easy to customize - if you make the names the same and just change the extension or something, then I'm sure you can deduce the filename of the larger image.