Are multple image locations advisable?

[Phil Soth]

Hi, all
New user here - well, since late 2013. Anyway, we are currently building our Zen Cart site and everything is going swimmingly. Zen Cart works exactly as described and I can't be more pleased. In the interest of being proactive, I am concerned that by the time we are ready to go live, we will have roughly 4000 products, each with its own image of course and some with multiple images, plus a _LRG version for each one (I tried IH4, but that is a story for another time - it's actually on page 99 of the IH4 thread). I am concerned that with that many images, response time may bog if all the images are in only one location each for the small, medium and large versions. Should I be putting images in different locations to spread the load, and if so, how do I do dat?
Thanks for any help anyone can provide.
Phil
My site-in-progress is www.heirloomstocherish.com/catalog, and we are only about 25% done.

[gilby]

You can split them into sub directories in the images folder
images/fairies
images/dragons
etc

You need to have the same directory structure in the medium and the large sub directories as well

A bigger problem that you have is you appear to be using the one image for display of small, medium and large images. This gives you jaggy small images as the browser only approximates when it resizes.
It also takes a lot longer for a user to see your page as they have to download 10 times as much data as they should have to.

See this tutorial Image Preparation - How-to

[Phil Soth]

Thank you the quick reply! Looks like I've got some work to do!

[mc12345678]

There are also a few different tools out there that can help you rearrange some things quickly, once you have worked out the quality issues of your images.

If you hadn't thought about it yet, would suggest placing your new pictures on your server where you want them before changing the setup inside ZC. So yes, you would have at least two of every picture being relocated. Then through whatever means (I suggest using something like easy populate) you can change the database reference to your image(s).

On a side note regarding having all images in a single directory, you have to watch out that the filename for one isn't a subset of the filename for another. Ie: image ab would show with product a if they (products ab and a) were named by product (ab.jpg and a.jpg)

[mc12345678]

I went back and looked at your issue(s) with IH and it looks like for the most part that it was the image orientation that you were having a problem with, some images tall, some wide. A poster provided a suggested fix for that, essentially make all your pictures square or rectangle but all uniform basically. If you are going to go back and rework your images, I would suggest that this be an attribute to consider. As for why some of the other images had issues, there are a few basic rules to follow when using IH that relatively make sense, but when not followed will stop things in their tracks. Using iH would shorten your workload of optimizing your images if you can work past the other issues you are/were experiencing. Afterall, it automagically generates all three sizes of photo from a single photo, maintains it's own directory structure (hash lookup) for the images, so it seems that it can handle large numbers of images relatively well even if only a few are attached to each item.