Dynamic Album creation not possible - Times out on thumbnails

dazkeirle

Hi,

I have an issue where I'm trying to create a dynamic album of all wallpapers on my gallery with a specific resolution.

I do the search and start the create album process but it appears there are too many images, and so too many thumbnails and when the page is loading, the list of "select thumbnail" getsso far and then gives up, not finishing the page and not allowing the creation.

How can this be worked around?

sbillard

Check the option for visual thumb selections. Turning that off speeds up the thumbnail list process.

You can also manually create the album by making a .alb file with the appropriate search, etc. stuff. You can create a smaller album to see the format of that file.

But even this may not work if your server does not have the power to process the image list within your browser timeout parameters.

dazkeirle

ok,

have a dedicated so don't really think the server is to blame.

ahh so theres a .alb file? i tried copying another .alb database entry but didnt think to look for an actual file.

I'd already turned off visual thumbnails, its just the list is too long.

I class this as a bug as it shows that the software does have a limitation for larger collections.

Wouldn't paging the thumbnail selection or giving an option to select one or just go random not be more sensible?

sbillard

No, an inadequacy of your server for the task you have asked of it. It will always be possible to create something that a particular server cannot process. Not much we can do about that. Zenphoto has been quite successful with large dynamic albums on other servers.

dazkeirle

Well i don't really agree with you, while i agree it's inadequate for the task i've asked of it, most would be, potentially throughout the album there are tens of thousands of files.

I agree Zenphoto itself as a gallery can handle this amount of files dynamically with ease, that's why I'm using it.

What I'm getting at is I don't think it's the cleverest thing to do to have zenphoto have to create a list of every single file in a folder (and all nested folders) just to create the album, when the random thumbnail will often suffice. It's hardly efficient to demand that every single time when it's only a percentage of people who will want to assign a thumbnail. Surely an option or checkbox which initiates that would make the creation of dynamic albums quicker and reduce unnecessary calls to the server.

Now, I'm sorry if I offended you, I couldn't do it any better myself and so I just have to learn to live with the limitations and find a way around it, I was just putting it out there as it seemed like a sensible thing to bring up, and perhaps a suggestion for improvement in making the software more efficient and user friendly.

sbillard

You do not offend me. But I do need to point out that you are the only one who has encountered this issue. I really do not know what your dynamic album consists of, but it sounds like it is the "world" which would not be a very user friendly album in the first place.

But you seem to wish to limit the functionality of dynamic album creation for everyone because you have come up with a problem unique to your site and server. Not likely to happen.

dazkeirle

Where folders broken down into a structure of res > category > wallpapers there are obviously many, many images.

For SEO from the frontpage it is convenient to provide an alternative link to a selection of wallpapers for a certain device i.e. "iphone wallpapers" etc. where you can quickly then send the user to a a folder which is buried deeper within the hierarchy, with it's own custom anchor headeing and without creating an additional folder at root and duplicating the contents (I thought that was the point?)

I don't want to replace the logical strict folder structure but I thought the dynamic albums were there to provide the functionality of additional ways of selecting a group of images with a common search paramater under a different anchor url.

Unfortunately it's been built in such a way that you basically ask of it to read, and output the filename of every file in that parameter even though you haven't particular told the software that you even need / want a thumbnail specifically.

To me that's a little limiting, and unnecessarily so. I don't mind you won't change the software, was only trying to highlight a very silly unnecessary request, even if it is only me who asks so much of it (everybody still makes that unnecessary call). It's a bit of a coppermine attitude.

acrylian

The dynamic albums are for that tasks. But of course "most" people apparently do not have virtually everything in a dynamic album. I also can't remember that we ever got a report about this, at least not frequently.

I suggest you "hack" the function for now. It is in `admin-functions.php` in `printAlbumEditRow()` beginning around line 1290. You will find checks of `$album->isDynamic()` there.

dazkeirle

indeed I will Acrylian, either that or manually create the dynamical folder using the file and database entry as you suggested.

It's not a problem for me, I can get round it, I was just trying to highlight a server call that hasn't been asked for, which in my eyes is inefficient but whatever, it doesn't matter now.

Just because people didn't bring it up doesn't necessarily mean that they haven't encountered or become frustrated by it. I don't phone Microsoft every day to report OS issues. It it's not surprising they don't with the "it's only you so live with it, we like asking for our server to reel off thousands of file lists for the sake of it" mentality I've just experienced.

Wish I'd never mentioned it but thank you Acrylian for giving me a pointer of how I can customise the code to make it more user friendly for me.

On the whole though I still think Zenphoto is excellent, and the way in which it supports massive catalogues of photos and images direct from folder structure is still unrivalled.

acrylian

Just because people didn't bring it up doesn't necessarily mean that they haven't encountered or become frustrated by it.
Sure, but if we don't get reports we don't know. Currently it is just you..;-) We are dependend on this as an open source project (more than MS for sure...;-)). That is how these projects work. We appreciate all feedback. Of course we also choose to set priorities on what to work as we are only volunteers.

Maybe an option to limit the album thumbs for dynamic albums only might indeed be an option.

dazkeirle

Thanks for your understanding Acrylian.

I agree it's not the most important bug and you have provided me with the means to work around it. So happy days.