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Many questions on setting up an image library

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Many questions on setting up an image library
Hi,

I am trying to use DBman SQL for a fairly simple image library which is quite similar to the gallery demo. I've got a whole slew of questions if anyone has a moment:

1. I read in the forum that to keep DBman SQL from saving images in subdirectories named after the ID tags I just have to changed the file save method to "simple". However in the documentation it states that "hashed" is required for databases containing more than 10,000 entires. Now I don't anticipate having a database that large anytime soon, but why limit myself? What I don't understand is why DBman cares at all how the files are saved since all it is doing is referencing URLs in the database. Is 10,000 perhaps the maximum number of files that can be in a unix directory or something? If that is the case then it makes sense, though it would be nice to be able to group a thumbnail and matching preview image in one directory.

2. I also noticed that when set up for image upload the program creates a separate table to reference image locations. Why is this necessary when all the image data is also stored in the main table I am working on? This seems like an unnecessary source of extra size and overhead. No doubt I can modify things (more time fiddling!) to just use the main table for image display info, but I am just wondering why it works this way by default.

3. I'd sort of like to get my setup working just like the gallery demo and modify things from there. I know that all the templates are included, but how do I set the rest of it up to work like the gallery? (tables and stuff)

4. In my image library there are two types of images, rights-managed and royalty-free. I would like a different template page for each. Reading through the documentation I think this should be simple to do with an if-then statement that looks at one of the database fields. Am I correct and what would it look like? (I have a limited amount of time for endless trial and error tweaking).

5. Lastly to change the formatting of the actual search results do I edit html.pm? I just want to hide some fields , show others, and display a thumbnail with the short results and a larger images with the long results. Doesn't look like you can do this with the templates. I've searched this forum a lot and some messages from two years ago seem to concur, though that was an older version with a differently named html file.

I played around a bunch with an earlier version of DBman SQL in '99, but haven't really touched it since. It has always been an immensely flexible program, however I've got a site to finish up and I don't have a ton of time to learn all the intricacies of the new version. Once things are up and working I'll have some time do dig into it all.

Anyway thanks much for any help or feedback!