Thumbnail Association?

[tommy2009]

Hi there,

Just a simple question I thought I'd ask before re-organizing my site. Do all the thumbnails in the specified thumbs folder have to be in the root directory in order for the HTML page association to work on the results page or can I create sub-folders in the specified thumbs folder say like thumbs/nature_thumbs and thumbs/people_thumbs with additional thumbs placed in them? Will this work or can I expect all thumbnails in the sub-folders to be skipped by zoom?

Thanks,
Tom

[Ray]

You can specify the location of the thumbnail folder as part of the Thumbnail options ("Configure"->"Scan options"->Double click the extension in question->"Configure images"->"Display different thumbnails for each file" --> the first field at the top is labelled as: "Associate files with thumbnails found at the following URL folder:").

I'm not sure why you think it needs to be in the root directory? Or are you referring to your "thumbs" folder as a "root directory"? (this would be incorrect terminology, the root directory is the upper most level of the website).

Are you trying to associate HTML files with thumbnails, but have some of the thumbnails in "thumbs/nature_thumbs" and some in "thumbs/people_thumbs"? If so, how do you expect Zoom to determine which folder it belongs in (i.e. what determines a file has a thumbnail in "nature_thumbs" as opposed to "people_thumbs")?

Can you give a couple examples which are more comprehensive, and include a URL/file indexed, and the corresponding thumbnail location?

[tommy2009]

Thumbnail Association? - Rephrased

Hi Ray,

Thanks for the reply and my apologies for my previous post as I read it few times I realized it was not very clear and confusing. Okay, very simply if I configure "Associate files with thumbnails found at the following URL folder:" to:

http://www.mysite.com/thumbs

Will it also find thumbnails here:

http://www.mysite.com/thumbs/nature_thumbs


Thanks,
Tom

[Ray]

The short answer is no. The long answer is, it doesn't really make sense to do so if you think about it.

For example, if you have the following pages:
http://www.mysite.com/tree.html
http://www.mysite.com/old/tree.html

And you have the following thumbnails:
http://www.mysite.com/thumbs/nature_thumbs/tree.jpg
http://www.mysite.com/thumbs/tree.jpg

How will it know which one to use for which file? It's impractical to treat the subfolders within the "thumbs" folder as the same.

Perhaps you're expecting the subfolders within "thumbs" to match the subfolders of your content pages (i.e., you actually have pages such as http://www.mysite.com/nature/tree.html) but this is not common practice, and very tiresome to manage (you'd have to duplicate the entire subfolder hierarchy of your content in your thumbs folder).

[tommy2009]

Thumbnail Association? - Continued

Hi Ray,

I understand what you're saying but the main reason why I brought up this subject is file limitation within a single folder. I'm running an image library which currently is about 2000 pages which equates to 2000 thumbnails and growing. This is no problem right now but what about if the site grows to say 100s of thousands or even a million pages/thumbnails? As I understand (correct me if I'm wrong) the windows OS has a limitation of about 4.2 Gb in a single folder not sure about server side OS like Unix, etc. So to remedy this I thought I'd make subfolders in order to unload some of the volume from the single thumbs folder and better organization couldn't hurt either.

So, in conclusion what I'm really asking here is how does one deal with very large number of pages ex 1,000,000 and wanting to associate them with unique thumbnails? What steps should I take anticipating such a large site?

Thanks again for your assistance.
Tom

[David]

Without commenting on the other issues, there is no 4GB limit in a Windows folder. I have lots of folders with 50GB or more in them (NTFS file system). NTFS does get slow however if you drop 10,000s of files in the same folder however.

I believe there is a limit of 4,294,967,295 files per NTFS volume however. Regardless of how these files are arranged into folders. Max file size is around 16 terabytes.

[Ray]

So, in conclusion what I'm really asking here is how does one deal with very large number of pages ex 1,000,000 and wanting to associate them with unique thumbnails? What steps should I take anticipating such a large site?

A better way to organize would be to use thumb folders relative to the content folder.

For example, a file such as:
http://www.mysite.com/old/tree.html
.. will have a thumbnail in:
http://www.mysite.com/old/thumbs/tree.jpg

A file such as:
http://www.mysite.com/tree.html
... will have a thumbnail in:
http://www.mysite.com/thumbs/tree.jpg

And a file such as:
http://www.mysite.com/old/archive/tree.html
... will have a thumbnail in:
http://www.mysite.com/old/archive/thumbs/tree.jpg

Does that make sense? That is a much more common approach to organizing thumbnails. And when you do that, you simply need to specify the following thumbnail settings in Zoom:

"Associate files with thumbnails found at the following URL folder":

./thumbs

Note that the "." above is a relative path, and it means "the current folder". So it tells Zoom to find the thumbnails for the current page in a sub-folder named "thumbs" off the current folder.

More information on relative paths can be found online (and also in the Appendix chapter of the Users Guide relating to CD-ROM distribution).

Hope that helps.

[tommy2009]

Thank You!

Hi Guys,

Thank you for all your responses and Ray thanks for clearing everything up for me. It all makes sense now.



Best,
Tom