Subfolder advice needed please

Dolemite50

Hello,

As part of the "learning experience"; I realize that my current setup is probably not ideal. I have been storing members' images in a folder called "pics" and I point to them in mysql. Right now they all are in the same folder and there are over a few thousand of them. At this point I can't even browse to all of the files using FTP because it must be beyond some limit. I'm hoping to hear some advice on a few things here:

How many files is "too many" to have in a directory?

Currently when a member creates a profile their image is named as their memberid#; such as 1234.jpg. If I go with subfolders, how will I seperate? Per thousand? Per 100? Assuming it's per 100; how would I design the script so that when the 400th member creates a profile it builds a new folder and names it 400 or whatever?

Can anybody please show me an example of what a script would look like to deal with all of the files currently on the folder? Again, assuming that 100 is a good number to use, and the image path is stored simply as the memberid + extension; how would I do something like:

$new_dir=100;
Create folder called $new_dir in pics dir
Select memberid, image FROM table where memberid < 100
WHILE...
move $image to pics/100;
UPDATE table SET image=$newdir/$image
..?

Very sorry for so many questions but I'm a little nervous about this one and would appreciate any advice.

Thanks

justsomeone

I ran into a similar problem to this once.

In my case, the filenames were alphabetic rather than numeric, but the same principles should apply. What I did was to create a directory structure based around the filename. So, a file called "dogs.text" would end up in directory "files/d/o/g".

I don't have the opportunity to dump in the code here, but you ought to be able to simply change your script to work as follows.

Store the image root dir as a text string, eg Define ("IMAGE_ROOT","/home/images/");
Generate the filename as normal, so you end up with something like $imagename = "1234.jpg"
use direxists() to see if IMAGE_ROOT.$imagename[0] exists, if not, create it.

use direxists() to see if IMAGE_ROOT.$imagename[0]."/". $imagename[1] exists, if not, create it.

5.. repeat this until you get to the final two digits of the filename.

Now you can store your file in the directory you have built up as above

Does that make sense?

mrhappiness

1st opportunity thing would be to create a folder named <member's id for each member

2nd opportunity thing would be calling mysql_insert_id to retrieve the id of the currently inserted entry and doing sth. like that:

$id = mysql_insert_id();
preg_match_all('%([\d]{1,3})%', $id, $folders);
$folders = $folders[0];

foreach ($folders as $key => $folder)
	$folders[$key] = (int)($folder / 100) * 100;

$file_name = implode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $folders).DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$id;

if $id is 35354315387 the following is generated

300/500/100/0/35354315387

Dolemite50

Thank you both very much.

That's looking pretty complicated to this noob's eyes but I'll mess around with it. I see where you guys are going with it.

Out of curiosity; am I way off base by just choosing a set number that I would like in each folder? I was kicking around this:
Lets say I want to have 100 in each folder. Whenever somebody uploads a pic the script compares a value in mysql to their ID number. The user's id# is 2500 and the value in mysql is currently 2500. The query says something like
if($userid >= $mysqlnum){
Create new dir named 2500..
move file to 2500
$mysqlnum=$mysqlnum+100;
}
else{
move file to (some sort of round $mysqlnum down to a hundred function which produces 2400)
}

uh oh,..I can hear you guys giggling already. hehe