We see Omeka S stores all media files in a single directory (files/original) in a flat way, with no subdirectory structure. When the number of files increases, this can become less and less efficient. Even listing the directory is not so pratical…
Is there a way to force Omeka S to build a hierarchical, tree style structure, which would be more manageable and efficient ? This would even simplify the administration of the disk storage, allowing the extension of disk space…
There’s no configuration settings or anything that will do that, but it can be done.
First off, the “storage” component is modular, so a pretty simple Omeka S module could be written that just replaces the default, flat “Local” storage method with one that is more split up (based on, for example, creating subdirectories for the first X characters in the filename). The existing Local storage already includes support for automatically creating any necessary subdirectories when saving a file, so altering/extending it to do this should be pretty easy.
The caveat with this: it’s going to be something you’d turn on before storing anything, or else you’d have to do a process yourself outside of Omeka to move any existing files into their proper “deeper” locations.
There is a module for that, Archive Repertory (i just see that it is no more listed in omeka.org), that uses one folder by item (important for item with many images, for example a scanned manuscript), and that can add a upper directory for the first item set. The directory names can be the id or any other identifier.