Tl;dr: I want to keep accesses to the original files to a minimum. However, I can't generate thumbnails for album covers in advance, and the original file is shown for low-res images instead of a derivative. How can I fix that?

Hi everyone,

I have just installed a new piwigo instance, which is running fine. Thanks for the great work you put in piwigo!

However, my photo collection is rather large (3-4TB). Therefore I am hosting piwigo and it's thumbnails on a SSD, and the photos are stored on a HDD Raid-1 as a backend.

As I'm running piwigo for a non-profit youth organization, I have no budget and try to keep hardware and electricity costs to a minimum. The data is only accessed once a week on average, so the HDDs are mostly idle and not spinning.

I don't want the HDDs to spin up every time a user accesses piwigo, only if a user downloads the original file of a photo. Therefore I generated thumbnails for all photos. But the album covers in the default (modus) theme (and many others I checked) have a custom thumbnail size that can't be generated in advance. Also for images with low resolution, no thumbnail is generated and the original file is displayed.

That causes the HDDs to spin up each time a user loads a gallery that has no album covers yet or opens a photo that has low resolution. Is it possible to either generate the thumbnails needed for the selected theme in advance, or modify piwigo to derive missing thumbnails from the XL thumbnail?

Thanks a lot in advance!

EDIT: I'm also able to do some PHP stuff, I'd look into packaging this into a plugin or something. I only need a hint where to start :)

Piwigo version: 2.10.2
PHP version: 7.4.4
MySQL version: Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.4.12-MariaDB,
Piwigo URL: internal only so far

Last edited by user19894 (2020-04-11 16:47:48)