Cameron Stokes’s Blog

I’ve posted a MySQL backup script to the lab for anyone that is interested.  The script will backup all MySQL databases and allows you to configure the filename and path for backups and how long to keep older backups in number of days.  I have mine set to run via cron every night at midnight and to retain 31 days of files so that I can revert to any day within the past month should anything happen.

It’s a simple script but it gets the job done.  Hope you find it helpful.  You can find the script here.

I’ve hosted a photo gallery in some form or fashion on my site for about as long as I’ve had my own domain. I first used Gallery and switched to zenphoto sometime last year for reasons I can’t remember now. Having close to 7,000 photos as of this post I was using up a lot of disk space on my host and was close to running out of available space. 7,000 photos isn’t an excessive amount but when each full-size photo is roughly 2 MB, it adds up. I decided the best way to free up space was to resize all of the photos down to the default view size of zenphoto and not allow the full-size versions to be viewed online. A quick test showed this would reduce the average photo down to about 100 KB, a significant reduction.

Having several thousand photos, I needed to find a way to batch resize them all. A quick googling found that convert from the ImageMagick software suite could do exactly what I needed. Using convert, find, and xargs I was able to put together a string of commands that found all of my images and converted them to the size I wanted:

find . -type f | xargs -i convert -size 480x480 {} -resize 480x480 {}


This command finds all regular files under the current working directory and calls convert on each file, resizing the photo, and replacing the original file. Be sure to have a backup of your photos in case you mistype any part of the command. Since convert is replacing your files you won’t be able to undo any files that are processed before you stop the command from running.

convert outputs an error when it encountered video or PNG files but kept processing the JPEGs normally. I found that when I ran this on images that had already been resized, convert wouldn’t resize them again or if it did the new file wasn’t affected as the file sizes before and after were the same.

I freed up over 9 GB on my host by running this. Going forward I’ll just run this on every new album I upload.