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What is the best way to organize folders for future scaling? I'm in progress to launch a new website. I expect that in the future I will have to deal with storage capacity of uploaded photos, respectively I will have to distribute them on multiple hard drivers. Currently I use something like this:

/1/1/photo.jpg /1/2/photo.jpg . /10/10/photo.jpg

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I use part of a file hash as a file name (and store the hash in the database), then organize them into subdirectories based on the first letter (or letters). For example, file de9f2c7fd25e1b3afad3e85a.jpg goes to 

/storage/d/de9f2c7fd25e1b3afad3e85a.jpg

Since hashes are evenly distributed it's easy to split the store to multiple drives, every directory should have about the same number of images. Currently, I have about 2TB worth of images organized like this, and it works like a charm.

Btw, one neat thing about this is if you somehow mess up your filenames, you won't have gazillion of images unorganized, just hash them and you're back to business.

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  • i use something like /storage/de/9f/de9f2c7fd25e1b3afad3e85a.jpg -- figure that a 2-level, 256-branching tree (65536 dirs max) will keep the # of files per dir at a reasonable level.
    – Jason S
    Nov 9, 2009 at 0:47
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Unique timestamped URLs would be a good start, f.e. 2009/11/30/photo-widthxheight-{other extracted EXIF information}.jpg

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