Names to ids

[Simon Wistow]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 02:31:46PM +0000, Andy Armstrong said:
> Yes sure - but Simon hasn't really constrained the problem enough for  
> us to confirm that as a possible problem :)

I'm always wary of putting too much detail about what I'm doign for fear 
of clouding the issue but basically my problem is this.

I have an image thumbnailer because, well, everyone does.

I want to play around with Simon Cozen's shiny new Image::Seek which 
takes an image and an id and stores a profile in a database. Later you 
can retrieve similar looking images by plugging in the id and getting 
back a load of other ids.

This would be fine if everytime I thumbnailed a directory I wanted to 
reanalyse the picture but I don't - my thumbnailer doesn't thumbnail 
already thumbnailed pictures and neither should it have to refill the 
DB.

However it *will* need to lookup similar images everytime because new 
images might have been added that are similar.

But this means that we need to have a consistent filename to integer 
mapping so that it remains consistent between runs. This means that 
collisions should be kept to an absolute minimum because if a totally 
black image's filename gets mapped to id 88888 and then a totally white 
image's filename gets mapped to the same then we're going to get 
very bogus results.