Ok. Made some small adjustments and made sure that the vfs image name 
was being appended to the path when we actually have to generate the 
image, and committed.

Thanks

I'll have to look at it again, then.  I could have sworn that I was 
defaulting to the globally configured style from the prefs if nothing 
was passed.

Hmm... in the current code if the style is not passed you cannot 
control the style show, because it goes in the DB to get the image 
style. Yes you can pass the style and force it, but if don't, you can 
get many different styles. And in practice is the same, if you pass 
the style from previews retrieved data. So with just little more 
strict usage you economize a lot of queries and be still able to force 
a style in portal blocks.
Of course not, as you must know the style to calculate the view hash.

Not passing the $style information was done intentionally so we can 
control what style is actually shown on the view regardless of the 
image's gallery's style. In other words, take the blocks for instance, 
we don't want 3 different styled thumbnails appearing on the Browse 
page or on Horde's portal page, for example.  The style is only 
explicitly passed when we want to force the use of that style.



It looks like the Ansel_Image::viewExists method you added could still 
work without those changes though?

Currently for every getImageUrl call, even with vfs direct, we always 
go to the DB to get all image data and create an image object. This is 
wastfull, as we need this only, the first time if the view does not 
exists. And style data are nearly always already available, we just 
not passing using it. So I add a viewExist method to just ask VFS if 
the view exists. With this we remove all queries and object creations 
( 9 with default prefs ), when the views already exists. The patch 
even fix passing style parameter to getImageUrl.