A conundrum indeed.
I now understand why Kookaburra produces five renditions of each image per album, which explains the significant increase in both file count and storage required—with Kookaburra for all albums not Fotomoto, my site is now >200 GB and >264,000 files, exceeding my host’s hardware limitations. I had initially blamed my former host, Bluehost, which led me to migrate to IONOS due to a number of critical issues, including excessive cost, storage needs, slow server response times (7-9 seconds vs. 800 ms on IONOS), and poor customer service.
Given this growth with Kookaburra both in terms of total GB and file count, I am now facing escalating hosting costs and the potential need to upgrade to a much more expensive Virtual Private Server (VPS), all for a site that receives fewer than ten visitors daily.
Additionally, I’m struggling to see a real-world scenario where I would need this many image renditions. I personally can’t distinguish the difference on my Windows machine with 27" 4K monitors or my Samsung Galaxy at QHD resolution (550 PPI), similar to Apple Retina technology at 220-440+ PPI but both on a six inch screen. I recognize that faster services like fiber and 5G mitigate issues with image presentation and page load times to a degree.
Regarding image security, my current approach involves multiple layers:
- Keeping images at a lower resolution and offering the highest resolution for sale.
- Watermarking everything, including thumbnails. (Note: Modern AI-integrated tools like Topaz, Neo, Lightroom, and Photoshop make watermarks surprisingly easy to remove.)
- Right-click management.
- Other similar measures.
I understand that all these protective layers, except for the first, are individually easy to compromise, which is a necessary risk for maintaining a reasonable web presence.
In the short term, I have found that I can safely remove all the *2x directories via SFTP without compromising the site to be able to manage storage and file count limitations of my hosting service. I wonder, do the master images serve any purpose once the photos and thumbnails have been generated? Should I consider deleting the photos directories and renaming the photos2x to photos?More experimentation may be warranted if I again bump up against host limitations. In this regard, I am considering a Cron job to monitor and manage my site size in an automated fashion.
In summary, I have a request, a plea if you will: Please restore the option to control image resolution, number of renditions, etc. in Kookaburra. This is the only remaining issue over which we can exert some control, from both a security and, most importantly, file size and file count parameters in this otherwise “best in show” platform.
(As a related experiment, I easily removed an annoying watermark from a restaurant photographer’s image in Lightroom, though I did purchase the non-watermarked version as well.)
Regards,
James.