I am trying to obtain this plugin but the download link fails. Is there a way to get this fixed or get a direct download link?

Thanks

Should be fixed. Let us know if you find more broken links.

Note: Make sure you understood what this plugin is about and why it is actually not necessary.(and might even be useless depending on the theme used). See the user guide's troubleshooting.

many thanks, I will happily report broken links if I find any more.

My understanding of the plugin is that it replaces the old pre cache images button.

I use this for my home based gallery with all albums as my zenphoto install uses my personal image collection as its base source of images. As this is my main collection of digital images I take the images are large and I use zenphoto to allow online viewing without having 2 sets of images, one for online and another for offline.

As they are large loading a gallery of freshly uploaded images takes a while, where if they are precached it appears better for end user.

As for using this plugin I merely copied the contents of the zip (one file and one folder with 2 files) into the plugin dir and enabled it. How do I actually use it? I don't see a button where the old one was.

Ooops I found the button that will check/pre cache entire gallery, what I was looking for is the button to precache and individual folder/gallery after I moved images from camera to server.

As said Zenphoto does that on request and it will take only once longer. Also again, if you use a theme with special layout sizes the pre caching will be useless as the theme (your site) will not even use them.

The best is to go through the gallery once before publishing so all is cached. Or just upload image sizes suitable for the web at all. 6MP images are surely not (unless your server can handle these which probably only a dedicated server can).

I won't argue your logic in respect of pre caching images as you are the ones kind enough to develop a great package.

I use a qnap NAS on my home network as both a NAS and a webserver.

My example would be that I attended a 40th birthday last night and saved the 167 images after editing in my photo folder. Previously I would have pre cached the images prior to announcing their availability to other guests. Once pre cached it was a swift process for page loads.

You are correct in that now it appears I have to manually look at thumbnails and wait for their generation (about 20secs per page) and then select each to view/create the mid size image (about 3 secs each). The alternative is to create a 2nd copy of all images on the NAS and resize them all to a smaller size (in my mind this is needless work and a waste of space as I would have 4 copies of each image in varying sizes instead of 3).

This is down to me and my requirements and zenphoto with pre cached images is still the best solution I have found, so for now I will manually pre cache by browsing the galleries before telling folks.

As to the actual caching of the plugin, no problem to use it for the whole gallery as it only caches images that are not already cached.

Sure, just make sure that the images on your site use the default values and no theme specific ones (for example the default theme for example does this while the Zenpage theme does not). Then this should work as intended.

Thanks folks, works nicely as intended. I use the default theme and values. It ran through a gallery with 28515 Images (2167 un-published) and 849 Albums in a few minutes where all images were cached, after adding a small album it took slightly longer but not much longer than the old pre-caching album button.