Dex

Big hearted fluffdragon...

...fictional ex-90s platformer mascot, nerd, plural, ΘΔ.



so, one of the discussions in VR this morning turned to how we structure the folder of commissions we've got. the key component in ours hasn't really changed since 2017/2018, but something may have to at some point.

OneDrive/Pictures/Furry/My Commissions/

One subfolder per artist. Acts as source of truth for everything including artist provided; WIPs and full resolution images all go here. Stuff preferably keeps the artist provided filename, even if it means creating a subfolder from them naming multiple things dex.png

iCloud Photo Library

I want to have everything ready to go on phone as well (also those dark few years of using an iPad as main machine). Artist folder with one album per artist, also a separate folder. This only stores webres images so we can't make a mistake on phone.

OneDrive/git/dexthedragon.co.uk/_data/dex.json

This acts the source of truth about metadata, alt text, tags, other people involved, and the like, resizing all images within the main OneDrive folder, with a list of exceptions for images not to touch. Used to build the website, based on MD5 hash - built for speed, not security (no idea what happens if there's ever a hash collision). Built on a collection of scripts that get the MD5, save a resized copy to 1200x1200 max, as well as handling other format conversions and thumbnail generations.

Problems

This setup mostly works, but it does run into the issue that we're slowly trying to move away from OneDrive for other things as we've moved away from Windows. For the moment, this still works, but if we do ever fix up the desktop Linux machine, the only way that can programatically access OneDrive is (as far as I know) Samba to the NAS, which isn't the fastest. Still, I think the NAS would be fine for this, there are some other uses where it might be more of a problem.

Additionally, I've wondered about switching the source of truth on metadata to Obsidian, for easier access to info without going through 8000 lines of JSON - for doing things like linking the source concept for that commission or bits of data that might be useful to me but don't need to be on the website (e.g. outfit here was inspired by this past commission) - but I feel like the things that would make it useful for person readable metadata would make it more awkward for scripting the website; I do not particularly feel like writing a bunch of regexes to get data back out of Markdown. And having them as two separate sources of truth risks them getting out of sync.

There's also an argument to be made for putting the alt text in iCloud as well as a caption, given that our Masto app of choice will now auto fill in alt text based on caption

curious how other people handle it

this is overkill for the vast majority of people, but it also makes it very difficult to lose something permanently given the amount of redundancy and backups

so curious what everyone else does


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in reply to @Dex's post:

I built a custom WordPress-based gallery and use that to store files, artist data, tagging, add other metadata, handle resizing, etc. It's both the public source of information and the single source of truth.

It's not perfect though. There's no file system renaming schenanigans going on or local backups unless performed manually. Migrating if off WordPress—which is something I've considered doing lately—is almost certainly going to be a massive faff too.

Still, it's a solution that fits my needs and my skillset, and has worked for many, many years without issue, so I can't complain too much.

i really need to update my storage to something more like this...

i currently still have everything in dropbox, a folder for each sona and then folders named <year>-<month>-<day>-<artistname>-<short_description> for each commission, with every alt version, jpg compressed version for posting online and square avatar crop and such in that folder

dropbox sucks and keeps popping up annoying messages about almost running out of space so i moved everything over to google drive on my furry gmail and keeping both in sync

...but google sucks now too, so i really should just migrate this to a self hosted and backed up place

Every single drive that I own- external, internal, sd card, thumb drive/USB....they all have a subfolder with a copy of my art inside of it.

I don't commission art often (I can see this being a nightmare to update frequently) and I should probably set up a more dedicated way of mastering a file (ie. copy the originals, then only copy those unless something happens); but pretty much...redundancy is the name of the game.

I consider my home my on-site storage and my portable storage that is always on my person my off-site storage. I do occasionally use web hosts but I don't trust them after the files inside of my google drive dissipated magically once.

Like, if a fire burnt down my house or something, I should be able to recover my files. So I just kind of leave it on everything.