Open Dental Forum

Hi,

I wonder if the images in the folder OpenDentImages/EmailAttachments are referenced anywhere in the DB or needed by OpenDental? These images are already under the patients' A-Z folders. The only difference is that the images in OpenDentImages/EmailAttachments are much larger in size. I'm not sure why. If the images in EmailAttachments directory are not being used, I would like to delete them to save space and speed up my daily backup.

thanks.

I wanted to provide some more information on my previous post. When I imported the image using in the Image Module, the image size is only 148KB and it's also that size in the A-Z folder after it was imported into OpenDental.

Next I referenced that same image in the Edit Claim window, Attached Images, then Add. I'm only doing this for our record since we are using NEA for attachments. This step is where OpenDental copies the image into the EmailAttachments folder. However, the size of the clone image is now 2273KB, 15X the original size. Is this a bug? Do I need the images in the EmailAttachments folder? Why does OpenDental need to copy the image to the EmailAttachment Folder when it's already in the A-Z folder?

The cloned image should be the same size. It copies the image because it's preferrable to have an "archive" that won't be altered or lost. Also, if the image is a perio chart, that image isn't already in the patient folder. But it shouldn't be changing the file size. I've put it down as a bug.

Is there a use case where OpenDental will load up the images (e.g. 20090508_604185937500641.jpg) from the EmailAttachments folder at all since those images are "archived"?

If they are not used at all, I'm planning to delete them since they take up 80% of my daily backup space.

If they are used by OpenDental in some way, then I need to find a way to revert them to their oringinal sizes. My thought right now is to query the DB and get a map listing (20090508_604185937500641.jpg -> JohnDoe.jpg in A-Z) and then copy JohnDoe.jpg to 20090508_604185937500641.jpg to revert the size but maintain the same name 20090508_604185937500641.jpg

OD currently doesn't access those images that are attached to claims unless you are inside the claim in question. But there are other kinds of images in that folder too, like email attachments. It should be resilient enough to at least not crash if an image is missing, but no guarantees. Can't you just exclude that folder from your backup?

It is not just the backup size. My disk storage is going up ~20MB a day instead of 1-2MB. Anyway, I have a script in place to overwrite the files in the EmailAttachments folder with the originals to revert the size until the bug is fixed.

There are 2 other bugs I found:
1. Attached images are not sticky when doing a preauth, but fine in claims.
Treatement Plan -> Pre Authorization -> select a preauth -> Attached Images -> Add -> select a BW image for example
The BW filename shows up in the Attached Images text box, but after closing the Edit Claim window and re-opening it again, the BW filename is no longer in the Attached Images text box.

2. When images are copied into the EmailAttachments folder their file type meta-data changes. For an example, JonhDoe123.jpg is copied as 20090508_604185937500641.jpg into the EmailAttachments folder. But when I open up 20090508_604185937500641.jpg with an image viewer (IrfanViewer), it reports the file as a PNG file with incorrect extension.

This issue is fixed. The reason for the bigger file size is because the original jpg was compressed and the new one was not. This will still be an issue any time the original image is cropped or rotated in OD because we can't just copy the original.

I couldn't duplicate the issue with the file type.