disk usage - so many thumbnails

[affk]

hi,

First of all, I have to say I'm really impressed by the quality of this gallery and even more impressed by the quality of the support forum.

I have a small question about the disk usage.

Let's say I am stingy and choose a host offering a short disk capacity (200 Mo or so).

Once put a forum and a CMS I have little space left for the pictures.

I consequently resize my 5.1 Megapixel artwork into a 768 x 576 postcard before uploading them.

but the thumb folder seems to contain 3 versions of all my pictures, among them, a large one, as big as the uploaded one.

Could we set, through a parameter, a more clever behavior, or choose a "on-the-fly" resizing for the largest pictures, the ones displayed on the modal box.

Being stingy and short-sighted (big thumbnail) it's in fact even worse

[Jan]

Hi, because of these three images, you save your RAM and your CPU and user's download time ... E.g. user should see small images (100 per site)... if the images are small, he will see them immediately, but if the images are large (but displayed as small), user must way until 100 images with resolution e.g. 800x600 will be downloaded ...

'on-the-fly' - what wold you do, if e.g. 100 users want to see thumbnail of an image at a time (your server will break while creating 100 thumbnails at a time ...)

My experience with thies behavior:
- it saves RAM on the server
- it saves CPU on the server
- it saves download (upload) time

and if you have e.g. original image with 1,5 MB, you get:
+ 0,27 MB large image
+ 0,004 MB medium image
+ 0,00018 MB small image...

so I think, it is insignificant, if you get e.g. 500 MB on free hostings today, but it is not insignificant if the server is doing thumbnail for 3 sec., or if user must download a list of images which take a 0,2 MB ...

Jan

[affk]

nevertheless... doing all the resizing stuff beforehand... I think I'll take the liberty to tweak the plugin to use originals in place of large thumbs...

or something like this...

dunno