Hi all, first post here. I shoot photos at Chippa United home games in Gqeberha and over the last three seasons I've piled up roughly 9,000 JPGs in folders named by date, like 2024-03-16_vs_Sekhukhune. A friend runs Zenphoto for his wildlife pictures and I'd like to move the whole lot into a fresh 1.6.x install instead of keeping it all on a hard drive.

Two things I can't decide before I start uploading:

1. Should I make one album per season with a subalbum per match, or a flat album per match and then build "season" views with dynamic albums? People mostly ask me for "all photos of player X", so I was planning to tag player names and maybe use dynamic albums for those too. Does that get slow with a few thousand tagged images on shared hosting?

2. My camera writes the correct EXIF date, but the folder date is the match date and sometimes I upload a day later. What's the cleanest way to sort images inside an album by the EXIF DateTimeOriginal, and does the album date follow the newest image or the folder?

Any tips from people who run sports or event galleries would be great.

Should I make one album per season with a subalbum per match, or a flat album per match and then build "season" views with dynamic albums? People mostly ask me for "all photos of player X", so I was planning to tag player names and maybe use dynamic albums for those too. Does that get slow with a few thousand tagged images on shared hosting?

If you are on shared hosting you know is a bit limited I would recommend to organize in not too huge albums and rather divide in smaller sub albums since Zenphoto is file system based. Please also review how this works regarding the smaller sizes Zenphoto creates on https://www.zenphoto.org/news/caching/

Dynamic albums are basically just saved searches and are a way to organize regardless the fixed physical structure. You have to try a bit what works best on your site/server.

My camera writes the correct EXIF date, but the folder date is the match date and sometimes I upload a day later. What's the cleanest way to sort images inside an album by the EXIF DateTimeOriginal, and does the album date follow the newest image or the folder?

Generally the image date should be the exif date if you enabled the related exif fields on Options > Image during import. You can do a refresh later (on huge sizes do this per album not in total due to the overhead).

You can enable on Options > Gallery > Gallery behaviour if the album date should be the latest image date.

Thanks a lot, acrylian, that settles it for me. I'll go with one album per season and a subalbum per match, so no album ends up with thousands of files, and I'll keep the player tags for the dynamic albums only. I also ticked the EXIF date fields under Options > Image before the first import and set the album date to follow the latest image, so a late upload no longer shuffles the order. The first two seasons are in now, around 3,000 frames, and the cache pre-render per album worked fine on my shared hosting. The matches themselves I check against the Chippa United league table and results so the subalbum names carry the right opponent and date.

One more thing I noticed: refreshing metadata per album, as you suggested, takes a minute or two for 200 images, but doing it for the whole gallery at once timed out. Good to know before I start on the third season.

One more thing I noticed: refreshing metadata per album, as you suggested, takes a minute or two for 200 images, but doing it for the whole gallery at once timed out. Good to know before I start on the third season.

Yes, that is sadly to be expected depending on the server power and memory and the more (and larger dimensionwise) you have images. To read the metadata basically every image has to be loaded one after the other.