I have installed (and reinstalled) Coppermine a few times and have fed it all sorts of images & movies without any problem at all. Rather robust application and I plan to grow rather intimate with it. But I am having a human logic problem trying to import about 5,000 images into Coppermine in a structured fashion and wondered if someone might help me better define an approach for this who understands the app. Wrangling this 2+ gig mass of images is cumbersome and slow, so trail-n-error on a large scale will take me months.
The images were delivered to us in one folder from a W2K server, which then contains about 350 nested folders. Some of those folders include nested sets themselves, sometimes going 5-8 folders down. Many folder (and image) names contain spaces, ampersands, etc. Some folders contain only 1-2 images, others contain hundreds. There are everything from PDFs through MOV and QT files in the collection, but mostly JPEG and GIF files. I can beat the file/folder naming problems with a small Perl script. I think.
But to the collection creator each nested folder represents a Coppermine category in one big album. And folders nested under each category are sub-categories themselves.
Here's where my logic challenge begins to come in. I've been manipulating the collection on a Win server in order (among other things) to inject ITPC fields into each image. Coppermine (using the ITPC mod I saw here in the forum) eats the newly inserted ITPC fields without any problem at all, which is great. And since I can auto-add the folder name as an ITPC keyword or 'category', I thought there might be a way to use them as category names in Coppermine. Doesn't look that way. So I need some help.
How in the heck should I be approaching this? I'm considering a SQL script to just import all the folder names as categories and parented subcategories, then (gag) manually importing all images for each in small batches. Lots of small batches.
Could anyone suggest a better approach for this? Core issue one is using the folder names as categories - at the time of import if possible.
Any help or perspectives would be appreciated.
Jonathan