Override Magento's default image storing pattern - magento

Question

Magento stores image, by default, as
~/D/E/DEFAULT.jpg
using the first two letters of the filename to create the folder structure. I would like to have it work a different way, but can't find anything about it on the admin backend, or through google searches. Has anyone had experience with this before?

Answer 1

What you are looking for seems to be handled in the class Varien_File_Uploader, so deep down in Magento in the lib/Varien folder.
There is a method getDispretionPath($fileName) which looks like this:
static public function getDispretionPath($fileName)
{
$char = 0;
$dispretionPath = '';
while (($char < 2) && ($char < strlen($fileName))) {
if (empty($dispretionPath)) {
$dispretionPath = DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR
. ('.' == $fileName[$char] ? '_' : $fileName[$char]);
} else {
$dispretionPath = self::_addDirSeparator($dispretionPath)
. ('.' == $fileName[$char] ? '_' : $fileName[$char]);
}
$char ++;
}
return $dispretionPath;
}
Basically, the while loop has maximally two runs in which it adds a directory separator followed by a character (or "_" in case the character was a ".") of the filename to the $dispretionPath and returns that path. This method is in turn used in the save() method of the same class which then creates the directories:
$this->_dispretionPath = self::getDispretionPath($fileName);
$destinationFile.= $this->_dispretionPath;
$this->_createDestinationFolder($destinationFile);