I've moved the thumbnails around many times over this project
and hopefully it doesn't happen too many more. Once the database has
tens of thousands of items, the thumbnails start to become the biggest
headache on the disk. Backing up, restoring, and sharding files per
directory are slower and more effortful with separate files. In the db
means the db is a larger file, but this is disk space that was already
getting used anyway. Now it's simpler and has atomic transactions.
The initial motivation for this was to make the "more_after_limit"
feature, which would help the UI to not show a next page button when
the number of results was exactly equal to the limit.
However, in order to surface this more_after_limit status using only
the old search generator, it would have to be a special yield at the
end. I was getting tired of the special yields like give_back_params
at the beginning and warning_bag at the end, and this would be worse.
There is a lot of sideband information about the search that is now
more easily accessible when the search is its own object.
I was adding messages as strings because that's how they get shown on
the web interface. But it's better to return the real exception objects
and have the interface deal with it.
This experiment of bringing Photos and Albums closer to parity in
search is going well so far. I have found some situations where it
is nice to only get albums back from search results.
There was always some semblance that two blank lines has some kind of
meaning or structure that's different from single blank lines, but
in reality it was mostly arbitrary and I can't stand to look at it
any more.
I'm currently running an experiment where albums are also included in
search results, but they don't cost you any of your limit parameter.
So the len(results) was often bigger than limit and tricking this
paginator into thinking we needed a next page when really we didn't.
This workaround can be undone when I decide how to make the album
results more official.
I've been thinking about this for a while but couldn't think of
the perfect way to implement it. I still haven't, so instead I'm
just starting with something and we'll see how to improve later.
At any rate, I can update the rest of the system to expect Albums
coming out of search so that if I ever have a better algorithm
everything else will already be ready for it.
For this first experiment, just any photos that are part of an album
will send that album out as a result. It doesn't even respect the
limit parameter, it's really just to see how it feels to use.
