This will help understand usage patterns to know what to focus on, e.g.
- are many people using thumbsup on Windows?
- are there many galleries with > 10,000 photos?
The current code doesn't create an output structure for them, so we don't create thumbnails.
This is good since the thumbnail generation would likely fail.
However we still try to render thumbnails in the themes.
The themes could be smart enough to skip invalid files, but it's easier to ignore them from the start.
1. Move from a JSON index to a SQLite database.
- This allows the indexing to be interrupted & resumed
- Updating the index consumes less RAM than loading / saving an entire JSON object
- Loading the index consumes less RAM since it can be streamed, only exacting the properties we need every time (instead of loading all EXIF data in memory, only to discard most of it later)
- These make a big difference when processing 10,000+ photos
2. Switch from <glob> to a manual <readdir>
- Glob would take several hundred or GB of RAM when asked to find several thousand files
- Manual approach with <micromatch> library does the same thing in a fraction of the time / memory usage
3. Exiftool optimisations
- Run 1 exiftool process per CPU, still in batch mode (divide all files to be read into 1 bucket per CPU)
- Stream the exiftool output instead of buffering it in memory
Before changing it back, need to list the rules for extension changes. For example:
- should GIF thumbnail should be JPG, to avoid animations on the album page?
- what about transparent GIFs, will they look weird in JPG?
- maybe GIFs should stay as GIFs, but kept to a single frame only for thumbnails
- same thing for pngs, which might be better kept as PNG for transparency
- all other non-browser-friendy formats should become JPG
These rules will be a lot easier to implement when the new input data structure is in place
The main changes are
- this introduces relative paths, since some HTML files have to go ".." to get to public/media
- it also introduces the difference between album.path (OS dependent) and album.url (forward slashes)
One major change here is that thumbnails will always be generated as ".jpg".
This is potentially a breaking change, in the sense that all "png" or "jpeg" thumbnails
would be to re-calculated and re-uploaded.