Question

I’m working on a web app that inventories your home items. I’m 90% there except now I need to figure out a way to export photos should the user so chooses. I’ve managed to export the items into a CSV file, but what good is that if they can’t have their photos? I’m currently using MongoDB for the backend, but regardless of how I store them, I need a way where a user clicks a button “Export Photos” and it gets compress into one file for the user to download.

My only concern is what if they’ve stored hundreds of photos?

Answer 1

To avoid blowing out your php process, I’d recommend you dump the files out of MongoDB one by one in a temporary directory on the filesystem, and then use exec combined with tar or zip to turn it into a compressed archive that you send to the user.

Of course this could end up in a pretty bad DDoS of your site, so you’d better write that in a careful way, i.e. if the user has more than 100 images, using a queue with Gearman or some RabbitMQ server might be a good thing, and then you could tell them they will get an email once their archive download link is ready or something? It shouldn’t be a daily thing to export all your pictures I assume, so may be acceptable.