Asset Organization in Network File System

Have recently gotten a request from my internal team on our asset files in Squidex. Today all asset files are stored on the file system. Each app has a separate folder by GUID, and each asset in that app is in that folder under its own GUID. As well, resized assets get created and stored here.

The complaint I am hearing is that they feel there are too many files in one directory, and it is difficult to know what each file is since its just a GUID. Note, this is an individual who doesn’t want to use the Squidex interface directly.

Looking to see if there is any possibility to…

  1. Limit the number of assets being all in one directly. While the file system does support many more assets than we currently have, the larger number of assets stored in a single folder does impact overall performance in visually viewing the folder. We are launching a new piece soon that will have 80k+ assets that will also be responsively sized, so we expect the total assets to increase quite a bit.

  2. They would prefer the ability to have some naming structure on the files.

In terms of #1, it would be nice if the folder structure under an app could mimic the folder structure of assets in Squidex. That would give some control to the app creator to limit the size of # of assets in each network directory as well as keep similar organization as the app itself.

In terms of #2, general file name that was uploaded would work best, but since Squidex focuses on GUID, it already allows same file name more than once, and so this may not be possible. Another option might be something like General file name + Guid to keep each file unique, but this could run into issues for files already at max length with the name uploaded.

Anyways, I let the person in-house know I would look into both requests for them, so passing this feature request along to see if possible.

Why do you care about the files in the file system? I never had a look to it actually. I store them in Google Cloud storage or azure and never touch it.

I personally don’t use it either. This is coming from our team that manages the network. They just don’t like having a file structure that is so large in one folder and it being unclear what each is.

I’ve mentioned to them in the past that is not too concerning from our end, they asked me to reach out to you and see if anything could be done and I let them know I would.

From my viewpoint because of GUID file names, like you mentioned, its not worth going into. From the viewpoint of them seeing the folder of assets though it will become issue because folders with too many files slows down. That’s why I mentioned solution 1 pointing to folders that matched structure in app, that would at least also help manage this issue.

In terms of Google Cloud, we are currently avoiding it because of added cost.

If I am really bored I could look into that, but the priority is Integer.MaxValue now.