Remove Part of File Names using PHP
Since David’s Batch Processor was pre-installed in GIMP on Ubuntu Studio, I used it extensively in the ICAF Gallery project today. My goal for these images is to resize their thumbnail version to 10KB or smaller and retain the original size for the enlarged version. Because most of these images are in different resolution, I randomly selected the scale value in the Batch Processor to resize the images. Then I had to manually view the file size of each image to see whether or not an image has to be resized again. After the differentiation, I moved the images that need to be resized once more to a new sub-directory and started the above process one more time. I would repeat these steps again and again until all the thumbnail version of the images are under 10KB.
During the early use of the Batch Processor, I missed a very important feature that is to save the newly processed images to a different folders. This resulted my decision to write this Batch File Name Remover script. The source code for this script is very easy to understand. It’s just some PHP functions plus two Linux commands: ls and mv. I always place a postfix after the file name of processed thumbnails: “-thumb”. Because of that, I need to remove this postfix whenever I repeated the above resize steps. The ls command is used to list the file name that contains the specified characters into an array. The mv command is used to remove the specified characters from the file name using PHP explode function. I used PHP instead of native Linux Bash script because PHP is easier than Bash for me 
. The source code for this script is available here.
Below is the Batch File Name Remover in action:
My Latest Project
I have been volunteering at ICAF (International Child Art Foundation) since April of this year. When I first started off, I was assigned to be a video editor to edit pre-recorded videos for some international festivals. The reason why I selected this position is probably because I put the video editing skill on my resume I used Kdenlive and Openshot interchangeably to edit these videos. Sometimes I also used Audacity to sync between left and right channel of the videos.
After three months of video editing, I was just beginning to love to edit videos. However, I assigned to redesign the gallery page on the ICAF website two weeks ago. This is my second web development challenge. My first challenge, as you can see on my website, was to build the first website for another non-profit organization. Although that project was abandoned long time ago because the interruption of school work, I learned the existence of server-side scripting at the time and wrote the first PHP application, the contact form on my website. This time I need to place thousands of children’s artworks and some other pictures to the gallery page in an organized layout.
I know that I have to use pagination for this project. It’s my first time to create pagination pages using PHP. The original design shown below was using JqPageFlow jQuery plugin to implement the pagination as the user scroll down the page.
ICAF Gallery page original design
After some more research, I thought that the infinite scrolling is not good for bookmarking since the manager specifically pointed out that he wants to have a back button for each page. Therefore I revised the design to use the traditional pagination method similar to Google:
Revised ICAF Gallery page layout
Based on the above design, I wrote a test page to test my pagination code. This page is still under development. I will integrate the code into the original page once I completed the testing stage. You can download the source code for this page here (I didn’t include the image files since these images are over 1.5 GB). Note that I used exec PHP function to execute ‘ls’ Linux command to output the image file names to an array rather than use a loop or a database table to process file names. This page also contains a script to split different parts of the file name since these names followed a specific pattern: “country-firstNam_lastName-age-thumb.png” as well as some knowledge I got from the C for loop tutorial. Also note that this is the test code, meaning that I haven’t added extensive comments to the code yet.