Cleanup old thumbnails

[Skinny]

Good morning,

Is there a way to delete all generated attachment thumbnails safely and let SMF regenerate them when needed (when a visitors visits a topic) ?
I have a lots and lots of thumbnails taking up diskspace from threads that are not visited anymore (2008-2012) and would like to delete those thumbnails until they are needed again.

Thanks,
Mark

[Kindred]

I could be wrong, but I do not believe so...

AFAIK, SMF does not generate thumbnails on the fly...  it generates them when created and that's it.

[Skinny]

I'm sort of familar with the sources of SMF and when I look at Display.php i see :

Code Select Expand


                     // Let's see, do we want thumbs?
                        if (!empty($modSettings['attachmentThumbnails']) && !empty($modSettings['attachmentThumbWidth']) && !empty($modSettings['attachmentThumbHeight']) && ($attachment['width'] > $modSe$
                        {
                                // A proper thumb doesn't exist yet? Create one!
                                if (empty($attachment['id_thumb']) || $attachment['thumb_width'] > $modSettings['attachmentThumbWidth'] || $attachment['thumb_height'] > $modSettings['attachmentThumbHeigh$
                                {
                                        $filename = getAttachmentFilename($attachment['filename'], $attachment['id_attach'], $attachment['id_folder']);

                                        require_once($sourcedir . '/Subs-Graphics.php');
                                        if (createThumbnail($filename, $modSettings['attachmentThumbWidth'], $modSettings['attachmentThumbHeight']))
                                        {




This would suggest that the code generates the thumbnail (Again) when it's not available, but I just need to be sure if it's safe to just select thumbs from the attachments table and delete those records and corresponding files from the filesystem.

Mark

[margarett]

Yes, indeed SMF generates the attachments thumbnails on the fly if they don't exist.

Look at the attachments table, it should be easy to see which are thumbs (a better reply will arrive when I'm at the computer)

[Kindred]

ah...   it seems that I was incorrect.

Margarett will be able to assist better...

[margarett]

Well, there is a easy part and a not-so-easy part

It is *very* easy if you have not so many thumbs... If this is the case, you can go to your admin
index.php?action=admin;area=manageattachments;sa=browse;thumbs
And just select all thumbs, remove, repeat until done.

But as you said that they are occupying a lot of space, I guess this won't be the case

It is easy to identify thumbs: check smf_attachments table, get everything with attachment_type = 3. Then just build the file name on disc (id + "_" + file_hash), @unlink it and remove the database row. Easy enough. Unfortunately you need to do this in some kind of loop with just some operations every time (and a pause) or you will probably stall MySQL if you throw him some thousand operations in few seconds...

Let me know if you need help building the code

[Skinny]

Thanks for the great reply! With this info and a little bit of Excel magic I was able to create two scripts:

1) Delete all the attachments from the filesystem (ID_GUID)
2) Delete the relevant records from the database and update the id_thumb column of the parent record to 0

Reclaimed around 50GB of old thumbs !

Mark

[margarett]

Reclaimed around 50GB of old thumbs !

That's great!