Error message on search page, caused by large image.

Hi,

- The orginal image is compressed. When PHP loads the image in memory, it uncompresses it in a raw format, and thus, it uses 8 bits of memory for each pixel in the image. So no, it's totally normal. Note that this check is in place to avoid fatal error messages, so that you get a more meaningful message and not a blank page.

- Even if there are no thumbnails on the search results, the images thumbnails are still computed because some alternatives to the Joomla default search system ask for the URL of the thumbnails in the returned results of the search plugins. For example, the extension extensions.joomla.org/extension/universal-ajax-live-search/ has an ajax search module which uses the thumbnails even though it uses the standard search triggers of Joomla.
And the plugins have no way of knowing who is calling for the search so it always compute the thumbnails: in fact it only computes it once and once generated, it will directly give the link, without having to regenerate the thumbnail.

- That's on purpose. We've added a hidden parameter when we added that check so that if someone had a special case we didn't thought of, they would be able to disable the check by adding an entry to the table hikashop_config. And you won't loose that setting in the database with the updates. Once a setting is in hikashop_config, it's not replaced, like we don't change your configuration settings values when you update HikaShop, unless there is a really really good reason for it.
It's the same as the difference between the options interface of your browser, and the about:config page which has a huge table of parameters that usually you don't want to change but you still can.