What's the best way to manage a large number of uploaded photos?

Question

I have a news website build with free version of Craft 2.3. It's obvious that a news website will have a lots of entries and lots of photos per entry. It will have at least one per entry and could go up to 10 or more.

So after few months I will have 100s of photos and I was thinking how I can manage this? Will this slow down the system when accessing the assets folder?

Should I use a field with a subfolder which contains variables like {slug} or {author.username}? But the problem is that I cannot search on assets subfolders or see all the subfolders at the same time so I can search within folder and its subfolders.

Anyone came accross to this problem? I'm coming from EE and I love craft just trying to make the transition. In EE I was using devdemon channel images which was creating a subfolder per upload but it had the option to search the subfolders.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Sounds like a feature request is in order. It'd be nice to be able to search subfolders for sure.

Regardless, everyone has their own way to organize but you might create folders based on department or whatever category the news is in—sports, politicians, people, religion, places, etc. and then set up the asset to save automatically in that folder based on the category, for example.

As someone who's on that content editing side as well, whatever system you setup, keep it consistent, make sure everyone uses it, is on board with it, and sticks with it. This is not just a technology problem but a people problem. Technology is only as good as the people who are using it.

When I worked for a local TV station doing over the shoulder graphics years ago, we'd have our goto images that we used and I've found over the years doing web it's the same way—people are creatures of habit.

When the site first launches, you throw tons of content at it but down the road, I've found people tend to reuse a lot of stuff. I mean how many different shots of the grand canyon do you need? I don't think every story, every time is going to have a new image thrown at it, but they will recycle a fair amount, so keep that in mind.

There's also a plugin called Introvert that you can setup so you can see reverse entries. That might be helpful to see which other entries that an asset is using. If it's been used by a lot of other entries, it might be time to say "hey we need another image of this..."