Closed Missing Photos

Okay - sorry about this, but I got an urgent request from my hosting provider to reduce the amount of disk space we were using. They were having problems on their storage subsystem and needed to reclaim some drive space.

We thought we were using just under 10GB of space, but it turns out their control panel was not reporting disk usage correctly and we were actually using over 50GB of drive space - almost all of which was in the galleries.

Given the cost of enterprise class hosting storage arrays, this was a huge expense to our hosting company ... who graciously have allowed us to maintain a high degree of usage without additional charge - but not as high as we have been using! If they were to charge us for our actual usage, it would amount to somewhere close to $2750 per month

So I had to do something drastic to help reduce our usage and keep on their good side, so that they would allow us to continue using a lot more than we should be, while maintaining a control over just how much we do use.

So effective immediately I have implemented an automated pruning routine which purges old photos from the gallery. There is a range of criteria used to select which photos are purged, but the key ones are:

- photos at least 1 year old
- photos which haven't been viewed many times

... basically I am aiming to keep popular photos online, while purging a lot of the clutter which doesn't seem to interest people as much.

I will run the purge routine daily to prune more photos once they reach one year on the site.

Just to be clear - not all photos will be removed after one year, only the ones which my system deems to be not as popular.

I am looking at alternative mechanisms for a future version of the photo gallery ... I already have some ideas I'd like to implement which I think might make the photo galleries easier to use and a more interesting feature for the site.

So I apologise for the extreme measures, but I really had no choice and had to act quickly - and the fact is that there are tens of thousands of photos which people are just not looking at much.

My suggestion going forward for everyone uploading photos is to not just upload hundreds of photos from each zoo you visit - especially not multiple shots of the same feature ... choose your best photos and upload only them.

At the end of the day, you can upload whatever you like and it will stay in the system for at least a year and then will only be purged if not many people take an interest in the photo.

 

Baldur actually made some good points:

There have been a lot of very poor quality photos uploaded to the gallery - and there needed to be a purge done at some point anyway.

The way I've implemented it, the more interesting / more popular photos get kept, while the rest are given a year and then removed. I think a year is long enough.

If we wanted to keep more of a historical record of zoos, zoo exhibits and animals, this gallery format is not the way to do it anyway ... we would need to be much more deliberate in which photos were kept and not just upload thousands of them.

 

Yes, that would be nice - but with 130,000+ photos in the gallery, it has gotten out of hand somewhat and we needed to start somewhere.

As I said, I am planning an alternative structure for the gallery, one which will allow more direct input by users in relation to which photos get "promoted" and which get removed (ie if enough people vote a poor quality photo down, it will get removed by the system, or at least flagged for moderator deletion).

I've been studying the mechanisms used on other websites for this type of thing and I think it can work quite well ... just need to spend the time to build that functionality into the site.

Actually I pay very very little for the hosting on ZooChat - which is one of the reasons I've been able to run it the way I have, just about anything else would be a very expensive proposition compared to the income coming in to cover those costs.

The arrangement I have with Quadra requires a bit of flexibility ... they have been extremely good to me and so I need to give back a little when they need me to - all up it's a very good relationship, especially given the support I get from them.

I have been looking at cloud based alternatives for storage, but haven't found anything I find compelling from a price / reliability / ease-of-use point of view ... and it would take quite a bit of work to re-architect the site to cope with a 3rd party storage solution - something that will have to wait until I've got time to rebuild the whole site.

 

a big problem with an automated purging of the gallery is that the less well-known zoos, especially in countries that aren't as much viewed as the UK and USA galleries, are going to lose out to a greater degree. As of right now there are about 2550 photos in the entire Asian gallery, as compared to, say, 2244 in the Chester Zoo gallery or 2744 in the Kansas City Zoo galleries. There are only 553 photos in the whole NZ gallery; Willowbank Wildlife Reserve to name one example has lost at least half the photos from its gallery. Because most Zoochat members (and probably most unregistered viewers) are from the UK and USA the galleries for those countries will naturally be most viewed so I think the losses will be greatly disproportional. You're going to end up with lots and lots of photos remaining in there, and fewer and fewer from other countries (especially as most of the countries in, eg, Asia, Africa or South America -- and to a much lesser extent NZ and Australia -- are rarely going to have new photos coming in to replace the purged ones). Further it makes it seem a bit pointless even bothering to upload photos from the less-visited countries, as they are likely to be automatically deleted within the next year.