Confused - Sorry about the newby question

[Anonymous]

After spending a while setting up EE for the first time, and reading through the instructions, I'm still confused.
Here is what I want to do:
I have several thousand photos, in an ever growing collection.
I want to setup a database that contains thumbnails and larger previews of all the images, searchable.
I want the original images to be outside of the mySQL database, with the images linked from the EE gallery to the originals. The original files should stay in their original directory structure. They can be accessible to the Web Server, since I am running it locally on Apache and I can make the directories visible to the Website.
It seems to me that when using EE, you upload the images to a common directory, and then they get processed. That is where I'm lost... I want to process the images from their original directories, and keep links to them somehow.

See where I'm confused?

Thanks, and happy Thanksgiving. May peace grow in the world.

Edward

[wkitty42]

i'm writting this without access to my setup to verify things...

first, are the existing directories accessible via your server?

if so, then you should be able to configure your paths in EE for each exhibit... then create each exhibit...

finally, you do the upload thing except you'll use the special setting so that the upload doesn't actually have to be done...

my memory fails me on if the artifical upload takes place from the ee upload directory or the actual exhibit directory...

thinking about this, if it were myself, i'd work one exhibit at a time... creating the paths to the existing photos and for the thumbs and microthumbs...
ee/exhibit-1/
ee/exhibit-1/thumbs/
ee/exhibit-1/microthumbs/
ee/exhibit-2/
ee/exhibit-2/thumbs/
ee/exhibit-2/microthumbs/
then create the exhibit... at this point, i'd copy the files from the exhibit's location to the ee upload directory... then go into the upload files section and you should be able to select the photos from the list, choose the gallery they are to be uploaded to, ensure to check the "special processing" setting (i can't recall the true name) and then push the process button to make things happen...

the thumbs and microthumbs should be created and i think that the original picture will get overwritten in the exhibit's directory... depending on your size settings in the ftp setup portion of ee, this may not be a good thing as you would loose the actual original photo...

i'd definitely have several copies of the photos saved before working on each one... when you get everything done, you can also have a directory for those originals like...
ee/exhibit-1/original/
ee/exhibit-2/original/
and can then add that size path to the exhibit's size paths so that those can be viewed within the gallery, too... i say all this with the thoughts that the default photos can be resized to (say) 640x480 while the original is actually 1024x768 or larger... and the original may not be watermarked while you may have ee and/or imagemajik adding watermarks to those default and the thumbs photos... additionally, if you were to want to sell photos, the eecommerce system could be set, IIRC, to allow access to the original... you'd want the original for the ability to have a service print large prints for wall hangings sold via eecommerce...

hope this helps and isn't too rambling...