⌘ Styx - Media migration tasks

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Maintenance Media tasks

This is available when you have managed to upgrade to Serendipity Styx 3.0.

This page is about old blog migrations and odd snares of migrational task helpers or automated synchronizations of your media library.

Until Styx 2.9.5, the recommended migration upgrade (link) used the usual way of updating a blog. In short: Drop the new onto your old and install/upgrade. If you are going another - lets call it free style - way with later releases, which is the successor migration recommendation, and you install a new Styx blog, filling it up with selected old database data, you might get new configuration defaults that interfere with your old data, in special when using migrational tasks like described here. Two of these examples are the media thumbSize and the thumbName. They have changed over the years.

WARNING: Think before you do! and Do not change them both on the same time! expecting your Media Library or blog entry items of years to persist without flaws and consistently.

Media library: Rebuild Thumbs

1. Keep all existing thumbnails
   Synchronizes your database with anything allowed to live in the real directory "/uploads", in case you put anything in (or have deleted it) by hand. Specifically, these are:
   • Regenerate all (*.) thumbnails (which don't exist yet),
   • Resize thumbnails (which don't exist yet by config set size) and
   • Synchronizes your database images table with Image directories.
   • Keep in mind: Having added multiple, manually migrated files to your MediaLibrary (not yet synced), these first two SYNC tasks may extend your timing or server resources in case of having already enabled the additional (optional) AVIF file variation image format (see below). Recommendation: Enable AVIF later.
2. Keep existing thumbnails only if they are the correct size
   Underlies the configurations set thumb size.
3. Regenerate all (*.serendipityThumb) thumbnails
   Renews all thumbnails that are named in the parentheses, so just an "all" instead of "certain" (as in the second) action.
4. Convert old existing thumbnail names
   This 4th option is not active or shown, as long as the thumbSuffix has not changed and you do not have at least one new existing media item with the new suffixed thumb name.
   It converts existing thumbnails, which are not named by the current thumbSuffix-scheme: fooThumb (as example), in the database, the filesystem and already used in entries to the same suffix naming scheme. This can take long! It does not matter keeping them as is, but to include them for the "Regenerate all" (3rd) option, you need to do this first!
5. Add / Purge all Image AVIF / WebP-Format variations
   Is for upgraders, to take advantage of more compressed avif / webp variation images for old media. Adding or purge depends on last action.
   Up From Styx 3.6 / 3.7 and PHP 8.1, the AV1 Image Format is available, which is relatively new in the market. Its compression performance - by same visual quality - is another huge improvement jump as it was for WebP with Styx 3.0+. But encoding takes it time! So you need a sober mind, plenty of minutes and extended server resources. This in special is a point when doing bulk runs like being described here. So maybe its a job doing in Maintenance Mode only, or at less frequency times? Think before you do this with lots of all images in a productive blog setup! So, you better have some experience with AVIF on single images before you fire this here.

Clicking on the second to fifth options, in very special N°4, since introducing a search & rewrite of blog entries using such image items, may reach your Server and PHP limit settings easily beyond several hundreds of matches and stop the task without having finished! Search for “PHP execution time” to set this up (maybe to an amount of images or entries x 0.5 seconds), if you are allowed to, and then request the task of choice. If you run into restrictions, just reload the page to proceed the task as long as needed. Once having requested such task, you need to finish it somehow or be able to survey the possible mess and repair it all by hand yourself!