Sorry in advance, i know this question must have been asked before but searching for bulk returned few forum results.

I just installed Zenphoto on Synology DS213j and like what I see. Problem is I have well over 10,000 photos collected over the years and simply can't spend the time uploading everything again.

Does anyone know a developed solution, a plugin, or a method i could use to bulk load all this. For example, if someone could explain to me maybe how the filesystem and database structure need to sync I could maybe configure Zen to look at my existing folder, run an SQL command to populate the database, then run some sync process that sync the two and make it all work.

Thank you in advance and sorry for what may be a repeat question.

Assuming you have some directory/folder structure which contains all images, you can simply copy that entire structure into the [i]albums[/i] folder of the installation.
All images will be recognized automatically and every folder/subfolder will become an album/subalbum (in Zenphoto terms)

I might be wrong here, but I got an impression that "read-and-import" procedure is only run when someone loads the page on the site. There is no offline batch processing, or at least I could not see it. I also noticed that bulk(y) imports do load the server, up to the point where standard load monitors raise a note.

Sorry,I do not understand what you're saying.
Are you now referring to the Synology ?
Do you not have direct access to the Zenphoto files and folders?

Whatever is within the /albums folder like folders with images etc or further folders with images is added as albums on discovery. You can upload via FTP which is as bulk as possible I would think. That is done on the front end as well as the backend. 10,000 photos especially if they are very large might overload the server though.

The cached image sizes are only generated by request unless you use the cacheManager and precaching (and have the theme used setup to do so).
http://www.zenphoto.org/news/caching

Zenphoto requires this albums folder to be on the same server, you cannot remotely use this. You might try to use symlinks. But since everything is filesystem based you might encounter issues as this is not tested.

Hello,

1. You speak of "uploading everything again". If these photos were already uploaded on your server (ex.: used by another gallery software that you had on the same server), you may use the File Manager included in your server's control panel to move them from the old gallery to the new one. If the structure was good, this is an easy way to to the job.

2. Loading 10 000 photos... You have two issues: uploading time and number of GB of traffic you are generating while uploading. Newer cameras generate JPG files that weigh more than 10 MB. So consider that if you have many large photos, your ISP might consider that you overload their servers, simply because you put too many GB on their servers.

FTP uploading will be much more convenient than uploading through Zenphoto. Just make sure you scan your folders to remove accented letters, spaces, special characters, etc. (these are automatically taken care when uploading through Zenphoto). There are many utilities to do that, but I like Free Commander (http://freecommander.com) with rename options.

3. Processing of photos is done the first time you view a page; then a processed image is cached. This is why it's not a good idea to display albums with 50 photos per page. But assuming you display 20-30 images per page, there is no difference in server load whether your gallery has 100 images or 100 000 images, because only one page at a time is processed. What could make a difference, however, is its popularity: if you have hundred of users viewing your gallery at once, your server might complain.