In 1.5 (assuming there are no objections), image width, height and bit
depth will be available in the image table of the database. This is
mainly for scalability. It allows replication and read load distribution
of this commonly requested data to be handled by the database, where we
already have tools for such things. A simple future extension would be
to bundle metadata queries for all images to be displayed on a page into
a single query. This is only a few lines away now, but was not possible
with the original NFS-based system.
Thumbnails are still not handled in a way suitable for our scalability
goals, this will be my next task.
The code is in CVS.
-- Tim Starling