Unfortunately, for now, if you use thumbnail types, all images get all thumbnails. It's been debated on Github as we all feel the need for a better system but can't agree on the best way to achieve it.

Your other choice is to use the legacy thumbnailer so you'll have thumbnails on demand, but that also has its cons like slow loading pages if you have many images on that page.

Thank you for your answer! Could you send me the URL of the discussion? I would like to read more about it.

I can't speak for anyone else, but in my case I would rather have one user waiting a little bit longer than a thumbnail folder of 2GB! It's only one time, once the thumb is generated the waiting is over for all :)

Best,

Corretje

unfortunately, I am not sure where it is exactly. It is a subject that comes back from time to time and the problem is always the same.

We all agree that, if we want to be able to set certain thumbnail types to apply only to selected files, the best way to do that is by using the already existing system of sets and folders.

What we don't agree on is should it be the sets or should it be the folders and then, should thumbnail types be attached to sets or folder or should we attach sets and folders to thumbnail types.

The problem is each has its own set of cons and pros.

Secretely, I think that if one of us just went ahead and made a decision, built it, and offered a pull request, that would probably be adopted. But it hasn't happened yet

Aha, I get it... I see what the issue is when using folders and/or sets. In some way folder and sets seem similar to me, but that is another discussion.... :)

I think we need to see it from the users / webmasters point-of-view or rather point-of-use. What is the easiest way for the user to handle stuff like this. A user just wants to upload a file and use it any where on his (or her) site. They don't want to "pre-select" the way it's going to be used. So in that case on-the-fly should be best. I think...

There's one fundamental difference between sets and folders that makes the decision difficult.

A file can belong to many sets but can only belong to 1 folder.

So if we link a thumbnail type to a folder, all files that need to be resized using that thumbnail type have to be in that folder and can't be in any other folder.

That would be a problem.

So if we went for folders, we would have to attach folders to thumbnail types and not attach thumbnail types to folders.

And then, of course, we are left with dealing with files that are not in folders and files that are in folders that are not attached to any thumbnail type. Should they be resized to all sizes? Should they not be resized at all?

Then do the same reasoning with sets.

It's... complicated

And on the fly is what we always had but again, it has a big performance impact.

@DeWebmakers

Here is the GitHub issue discussion.
"Conditional thumbnails #3559"
https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/issues/3559...

To show your interest, I recommend giving the issue a thumbsup and leaving a comment.

Finding a way to avoid unnecessary thumbnail creation would be very useful and open the door to all sorts of new ways to use images. The current approach, like you have encountered, creates a lot of unused files.