Question

I’m coding a basic gallery for a website with around 40.000 online people at any given time. Users will be able to create galleries and upload images.

My question is, should I make a seperate folder for each gallery and put the images in them, or make a single folder and put all images in it, but keep the gallery_id for each image in the database? Or, should I make a directory for every user, then another directory inside them for the gallery names?

How would you do this?

Ps. I need it to be as light as it can.

Answer 1

I would store them by id
and i would split them into folders (dependant of filesystem, some don’t perform well with lots of files in 1 folder), plus it is easier to find them if you have to manually look at something

Give each file an id, then using the first 3 digits of the file name, split them into folders. (you could start your auto-increment counter at 100000 or zero pad the id, so there is at least 3 levels

/photos/1/0/3/103456.jpg
/photos/9/4/1/941000.jpg
/photos/0/0/0/000001.jpg

You can store the relationship of photo to user / gallery / etc in the database

Or if you want to see how the big boys do it

Needle in a haystack: efficient storage of billions of photos