Optimising storage consumption for archived projects

[peha]

Hi all!

In my company we are often dealing with photoscan projects containing 10'000 images. Needless to say, that we need terabytes of storage for those projects. Moreover they regularly get backed up, what causes additional traffic.

Therefore my question: Are there any files in the project file, which can be deleted as soon as a project is considered as finished and before it gets archived on the archive server (apart from depth maps)?

Thanks for your help!

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello peha,

If you do not plan to modify the orthomosaic (using Assign image) you can remove individually orthorectified images from the chunks (Remove Orthophotos option).

Also you can remove thumbnails, but not sure, if it helps much.

[peha]

Hi Alexey

Thank you for your fast reply (as usual here). Really appreciate that!

I'd like to delete the files automatically using a script or a programm. In the explorer I see the the thumbnails and the depth maps folder. Is the the file containing the orthorecified images usually called images0.zip?

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello peha,

Yes, it's usually something like that, but the links to the chunk elements are usually stored in the /0/0/frame.zip/doc.xml file, so if you are removing anything from the the .files folder, you should also fix the mentioned doc.xml file by removing the corresponding lines, otherwise the project wouldn't open.

Unless I'm mistaken, there are no links to the orthorectified images, but there are for the depth maps and thumbnails.

[peha]

Thanks a lot!

[ashalota]

For anyone else searching this in the future, I ran this in the console window to quickly clear the orthophotos.
For a chunk with 24 photos in it, this cleared 2GB of space.

For a project with about 200 of those chunks (initial file size 658 GB), this reduced file size to 116GB. NOT BAD!

Metashape.version --> 1.6.2

Code: [Select]


doc = Metashape.app.document

for chunk on doc.chunks:
   if chunk.orthomosaic is not None:
      print('Removing orthoPhotos for: ' + chunk.label)
      chunk.orthomosaic.removeOrthophotos()



[ashalota]

Is there anything else you would recommend clearing out to save disk space?

My projects have:
 - aligned photos (sparse point cloud)
 - mesh model (based on sparse point cloud)
 - orthomosaic (based on mesh model)

The item of interest is the orthomosaic. I would like to keep my alignment so that I know what was input to create the final orthomosaic.
Is there value in removing the models, disk space wise? (Since these are easy to recreate from the sparse model)

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello ashalota,

You can remove the key points, is they have been stored in the project (not tie points!).

If mesh doesn't have too many polygons, the gain of its removal would not be great. You can check the size of the /model/ directory on the bottom level of the project.files folder.