Indexing photo Gallery seems endless

[markcrobinson]

When running the indexing on my photo gallery, the program goes through hundreds of files, taking hours to get through a gallery with only a few hundred photos.
This happened with both the new Gallery2 program and an older gallery program from Comdevweb. Zoom versions 4 and 5.
How do I begin the process of finding out what's going on?

Mark Robinson
www.HandicappedPets.com

The Gallery can be seen at
www.Handicappedpets.com/gallery

the gallery software resides in
www.Handicappedpets.com/gallery2007

[Ray]

You should first take a look at this FAQ regarding indexing the output of more complex scripts like message boards, calendars, or in this case, photo gallery software:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/msgboards.html

As explained in the FAQ, for these sites, you generally need to be careful with setting up Zoom and configuring its skip list so that it will not follow certain links. Many of these scripts rely on passing parameters back and forth between pages - and from a client's (or search engine spider's) point of view, there are many different URLs and web pages. For example, a single photo on your site can have many pages: one for the normal view, one for the 'detailed' view (with camera specs etc.), one for its "full size" view, and many others for things like eCards, slideshows, comments, etc.

Generally, these sites are not particularly search engine friendly, and that is why they have a built-in search feature. If you do not want to go to the trouble of configuring Zoom so that it will search your gallery software correctly, you can use the built-in feature instead, and exclude it from your site search. Having said that, it's usually not too hard to work out what needs skipping with a few test runs of indexing and careful looking at the Index Log.

I made a quick attempt at indexing your gallery, and came up with the following skip list which would be something to start with:

g2_view=core.UserAdmin
g2_view=search
g2_view=rss
g2_view=comment
g2_view=dynamicalbum
g2_view=slideshow
g2_view=core.DownloadItem
g2_view=keyalbum
g2_view=ecard
g2_controller=exif
g2_highlightId=
g2_imageViewsIndex=

Naturally some of the above can be omitted or more can be added, depending on which pages or views from the album, you wish to index. The above settings indexed only 276 pages using a start URL from http://www.handicappedpets.com/gallery2007/

Hope that helps. If the above prove to be useful for other people, we might add the list to our FAQ page as we have done for other scripts like vBulletin, etc.