I have also automated the whole thumbnail creation (also with irfanview, long before you were announcing that on the forum). I automatically create 100x100, 250x250 and 1000x1000 representations of the photos. I will not allow photos of 10 to 20 mb to be downloaded from my website, although I have 350 GB diskspace and 3500 GB bandwidth per month. It just doesn't make sense. So before publishing to the web, all versions are recreated and the original photos are replaced by max 1000x1000 versions.
I have all versions of that last year available on my website. (approx. 30 different generations), each approx 300 MB in size. This works well and certainly is appreciated by the relaties that visit my site.
I'll make the changes to my automatic generation and only generate the 250x250 and 1000x1000 thumbnails.
rgds,
Ronald
PS. Just for fun:
my ~1200 - 100x100 thumbnails total less than 7 mb
my ~1200 - x250x250 thumbnails total more than 17mb
my ~1200 - 1000x1000 thumbnails total more than 100 mb
my ~1200 original pictures total more than 450 mb
I do not think having a single thumbnail folder is a big drawback. 250x250 pictures will be resized to 100x100 by the browser when required and it avoids the overhead of producing and uploading two thumbnails for each picture. Obviously there is a some overhead when downloading 250x250 when only 100x100 is required but generally not a significant one.
I had forgotten to revise the documentation in Config.xml regarding thumbnails. I will attend to this in the next release.
As a fix to your web site without moving pictures could you perhaps alias pictures/250x250 as thumbnails?
pictures/250x250
thumbnails
- is breaking current functionality of my site in a big way; i.e. it is not backwards compatible at all.
- means we have only single thumbnail for both the small as well as the larger thumbnails
- means the documentation is wrong.