I have a folder with about 750'000 images. Some images will change over time and new images will also be added every now and then. The folder-structure is about 4-5 levels deep with a maximum of 70'000 images per one single folder.
I now want to write a script that can do the following:
Loop through all the files
Check if the file is new (has not yet been converted) or changed since the last conversion
Convert the file from jpg or png to webp if above rules apply
My current solution is a python script that writes the conversion-times into a sqlite database. It works, but is really slow. I also thought about doing it in PowerShell due to better performance (I assume) but had no efficient way of storing the conversion-times.
What language would you recommend? Is there another way to convert jpg to webp without having to exernally call the command cwebp from within my script?
I'm creating my custom binary file extension.
I use the RIFF standard for encoding data. And it seems to work pretty well.
But there are some additional requirements:
Binary files could be large up to 500 MB.
Real-time saving data into the binary file in intervals when data on the application has changed.
Application could run on the browser.
The problem I face is when I want to save data it needs to read everything from memory and rewrite the whole binary file.
This won't be a problem when data is small. But when it's getting larger, the Real-time saving feature seems to be unscalable.
So main requirement of this binary file could be:
Able to partially read the binary file (Cause file is huge)
Able to partially write changed data into the file without rewriting the whole file.
Streaming protocol like .m3u8 is not an option, We can't split it into chunks and point it using separate URLs.
Any guidance on how to design a binary file system that scales in this scenario?
There is an answer from a random user that has been deleted here.
It seems great to me.
You can claim your answer back and I'll delete this one.
He said:
If we design the file to be support addition then we able to add whatever data we want without needing to rewrite the whole file.
This idea gives me a very great starting point.
So I can append more and more changes at the end of the file.
Then obsolete old chunks of data in the middle of the file.
I can then reuse these obsolete data slots later if I want to.
The downside is that I need to clean up the obsolete slot when I have a chance to rewrite the whole file.
**So, by far every tutorial I've seen regarding this topic either for linux or windows, are including the compressing of files and putting them inside an image, and by so creating a new one containing these files.
--
A zip file appended to a jpg file can be easily detected. With a little analysis you can easily understand that the jpg file has some extra information at the end, and you can recognize the header of a zip file after the normal jpeg data (even if the zip file is encrypted)
Question is, is there a bit more smarter/complex method for hiding files inside an image ?
thnx for any help.**
Steganography can be done in 3 domains; the spatial, frequency and compressed domain. Each of these domains have their pros and cons.
For example, in the compressed domain, you can hide a large secret in a compressed image and it will be very difficult to detect as the binary stream is what will be transmitted from sender to receiver. However, in the spatial domain, the existence of a secret message becomes easier to detect as the natural image is transferred as a whole.
There are many new steganographic algorithms being published in journals each month, you can look at the top journals in this field (such as IEEE, or Information Sciences) to find a suitable technique.
In our appliation,we save some images in different folders like:
1
2
3
4
...
500
...
And inside each folder there are large amount of images whose size is (5kb-20kb).
Now we found that when we try to transfer these files,we have to compress them first using the winrar,however it cost toooooo much time!! Also two hours to compress one parent folder.
In fact the images in the application are map images like the google map tiles:
||
So I wonder if there is an good idea to save/transfer these small but large amount files?
Images like that are likely to already be compressed so you will get little gain in bandwidth use (and so transfer speed) from the compression step.
If the compression process is taking along time where your CPU is busy then try instead just creating a plain tar file (which joins all the files into one archive without applying any compression). I don't know about winrar but most other compression tools (like 7zip) can generate a tar file, so I'm guessing winrar can too.
If you regularly transfer the whole set of files but only small numbers are added/changed each time, you might want to look into other transfer methods like rsync. You don't describe either of your environments so I can't tell if this is likely to be available to you, but if it is rsync does an excellent job of only transferring changes (speeding up the transfer significantly) and it also always uses one connection so you don't get hit by the per file latency of FTP and other protocols - one file follows the previous one down the same connection as if the parts being transferred had been tared together so you don't need that extra step to pack the files at one and (and unpack them at the other).
Those images are already compressed. However, to increase transfer speed, you might try using rar in 'archive' mode. This does the same thing as tar: concatenates all the files together into one big file. Don't use any compression in your archive format.
Maybe you can use a fast compression library like Snappy. However, it can only compress a single file, and you surely don't want to transfer each file separately. I'd create an uncompressed TAR archive for that.
Previously, I asked the question.
The problem is the demands of our file structure are very high.
For instance, we're trying to create a container with up to 4500 files and 500mb data.
The file structure of this container consists of
SQLite DB (under 1mb)
Text based xml-like file
Images inside a dynamic folder structure that make up the rest of the 4,500ish files
After the initial creation the images files are read only with the exception of deletion.
The small db is used regularly when the container is accessed.
Tar, Zip and the likes are all too slow (even with 0 compression). Slow is subjective I know, but to untar a container of this size is over 20 seconds.
Any thoughts?
As you seem to be doing arbitrary file system operations on your container (say, creation, deletion of new files in the container, overwriting existing files, appending), I think you should go for some kind of file system. Allocate a large file, then create a file system structure in it.
There are several options for the file system available: for both Berkeley UFS and Linux ext2/ext3, there are user-mode libraries available. It might also be possible that you find a FAT implementation somewhere. Make sure you understand the structure of the file system, and pick one that allows for extending - I know that ext2 is fairly easy to extend (by another block group), and FAT is difficult to extend (need to append to the FAT).
Alternatively, you can put a virtual disk format yet below the file system, allowing arbitrary remapping of blocks. Then "free" blocks of the file system don't need to appear on disk, and you can allocate the virtual disk much larger than the real container file will be.
Three things.
1) What Timothy Walters said is right on, I'll go in to more detail.
2) 4500 files and 500Mb of data is simply a lot of data and disk writes. If you're operating on the entire dataset, it's going to be slow. Just I/O truth.
3) As others have mentioned, there's no detail on the use case.
If we assume a read only, random access scenario, then what Timothy says is pretty much dead on, and implementation is straightforward.
In a nutshell, here is what you do.
You concatenate all of the files in to a single blob. While you are concatenating them, you track their filename, the file length, and the offset that the file starts within the blob. You write that information out in to a block of data, sorted by name. We'll call this the Table of Contents, or TOC block.
Next, then, you concatenate the two files together. In the simple case, you have the TOC block first, then the data block.
When you wish to get data from this format, search the TOC for the file name, grab the offset from the begining of the data block, add in the TOC block size, and read FILE_LENGTH bytes of data. Simple.
If you want to be clever, you can put the TOC at the END of the blob file. Then, append at the very end, the offset to the start of the TOC. Then you lseek to the end of the file, back up 4 or 8 bytes (depending on your number size), take THAT value and lseek even farther back to the start of your TOC. Then you're back to square one. You do this so you don't have to rebuild the archive twice at the beginning.
If you lay out your TOC in blocks (say 1K byte in size), then you can easily perform a binary search on the TOC. Simply fill each block with the File information entries, and when you run out of room, write a marker, pad with zeroes and advance to the next block. To do the binary search, you already know the size of the TOC, start in the middle, read the first file name, and go from there. Soon, you'll find the block, and then you read in the block and scan it for the file. This makes it efficient for reading without having the entire TOC in RAM. The other benefit is that the blocking requires less disk activity than a chained scheme like TAR (where you have to crawl the archive to find something).
I suggest you pad the files to block sizes as well, disks like work with regular sized blocks of data, this isn't difficult either.
Updating this without rebuilding the entire thing is difficult. If you want an updatable container system, then you may as well look in to some of the simpler file system designs, because that's what you're really looking for in that case.
As for portability, I suggest you store your binary numbers in network order, as most standard libraries have routines to handle those details for you.
Working on the assumption that you're only going to need read-only access to the files why not just merge them all together and have a second "index" file (or an index in the header) that tells you the file name, start position and length. All you need to do is seek to the start point and read the correct number of bytes. The method will vary depending on your language but it's pretty straight forward in most of them.
The hardest part then becomes creating your data file + index, and even that is pretty basic!
An ISO disk image might do the trick. It should be able to hold that many files easily, and is supported by many pieces of software on all the major operating systems.
First, thank-you for expanding your question, it helps a lot in providing better answers.
Given that you're going to need a SQLite database anyway, have you looked at the performance of putting it all into the database? My experience is based around SQL Server 2000/2005/2008 so I'm not positive of the capabilities of SQLite but I'm sure it's going to be a pretty fast option for looking up records and getting the data, while still allowing for delete and/or update options.
Usually I would not recommend to put files inside the database, but given that the total size of all images is around 500MB for 4500 images you're looking at a little over 100K per image right? If you're using a dynamic path to store the images then in a slightly more normalized database you could have a "ImagePaths" table that maps each path to an ID, then you can look for images with that PathID and load the data from the BLOB column as needed.
The XML file(s) could also be in the SQLite database, which gives you a single 'data file' for your app that can move between Windows and OSX without issue. You can simply rely on your SQLite engine to provide the performance and compatability you need.
How you optimize it depends on your usage, for example if you're frequently needing to get all images at a certain path then having a PathID (as an integer for performance) would be fast, but if you're showing all images that start with "A" and simply show the path as a property then an index on the ImageName column would be of more use.
I am a little concerned though that this sounds like premature optimization, as you really need to find a solution that works 'fast enough', abstract the mechanics of it so your application (or both apps if you have both Mac and PC versions) use a simple repository or similar and then you can change the storage/retrieval method at will without any implication to your application.
Check Solid File System - it seems to be what you need.