Bulk Importing Images --> Main image only, no derivatives built, only built when image node is viewed, not when rendered in view

Hey there,

I'm running into some difficult to work with functionality in the image module.

Situation leading to the issue: (reproducable) In Drupal 6, with a fresh install and Image 6.x-1.1, upload a large quantity of images via FTP, and import them using image import, and tag them with a particular taxonomy term (In my case, an event name).

Next you'll need views. Have a view that renders all of the terms and use views relationship for fun to pull one particular image from the nodes in the term. Set the view to render the images as a link to another view with the term name passed as an argument (say: renderevents/termName). That view will attempt to render the image nodes in the "thumbnail" version.

However, the thumbnail for a given image node DOES NOT RENDER, infact only images from image nodes you've viewed show up. Nodes that have not been individually viewed simply will not have image derivatives!

This appears to stem from the following discussions on this module from the issue queue:

http://drupal.org/node/159847
-and-
http://drupal.org/node/242341

My observations thus far

It would appear that the current cause of this issue deals with the belief that rendering all of the image derivatives would cause a performance issue, which is an understandable assumption. However, in choosing to only render images when they are viewed as a node means that using image derivatives (thumbnail or custom) isn't possible

Possible direction for a solution:

Perhaps it would be possible to create an option where the site processes all non-processed images to create derivatives. The admin thereby can choose to create all the derivatives (performance issue), or allow it to only create derivatives when a particular node is viewed.