Thumbnails in IP4.0 Abysmal

[Dark Shogun]

yeah I have no interest in limiting the amount someone can upload. Taking one individuals upload isn't a bandwidth problem. The issue is then allowing 20K other users to  download this huge image. That is why the proper solution should be to resize what gets downloaded instead of preventing users from uploading whatever they like.

​But again you keep saying stuff about 20k users downloading a huge image. IPB allows you to restrict the file size. If you don't want someone uploading a 4MB picture that could be downloaded by 20K people than restrict it to 2MB or whatever. I don't see how the dimensions play into this. If you reduce the max dimensions of the full image (not thumbnail) you reduce how the person sees it. One person may have a display that shows a 900x900 picture at almost full screen and another would show the same dimensions and it only take up 1/4 of their screen. It would be more logical to restrict the file size and make the dimensions flexible depending on the size of the display. Again you save space and bandwidth by restricting the size and/or format (bmp, jpeg, png, etc) NOT the dimensions. Think about it. A .bmp file would probably be 4 times the size and as such 4 times the bandwidth of a jpeg.

Thank you

Dark Shogun

[Dark Shogun]

I'm sorry for double posting but while I was editing my original post it said I ran out of time to do so. I posted an example. One picture is a 24 bit bmp image and the other is a jpeg. Both gave the same dimensions of 1024x768. The bmp image is 2.25 MB while the jpeg is 828 KB. Aparently bmp files don't actually show as pictures in posts here.

 Desert.bmp

[Cyrem]

Good, no-one should use BMP for web.

[SJ77]

 

​​But again you keep saying stuff about 20k users downloading a huge image. IPB allows you to restrict the file size. If you don't want someone uploading a 4MB picture that could be downloaded by 20K people than restrict it to 2MB or whatever.

Because I don't want to restrict users from uploading images.. I run an image board I'm in the business of having users supply me with content. Stopping the very action I want is not the solution. The burden to resize should be on me not them.  I would much rather allow them to upload whatever they like hassle free and only distribute the resized file to those who wish to download. Handle it in a way that is constructive to my website as opposed to destructive.

Again you save space and bandwidth by restricting the size and/or format (bmp, jpeg, png, etc) NOT the dimensions.

This statement is incontrovertibly false.  Perhaps you think I am talking about an HTML perspective change, well I am not. I am talking about caching the image and producing a resized version of it. Reducing the physical dimensions of an image regardless of format DOES reduce file size. It's just an indisputable fact. I have already been doing this on my website for 3 years, so I know it's a workable strategy.  Taking the quality to 80% and reducing the file size combined has had an enormous impact on the file sizes being downloaded and on my over all bandwidth usage. When I say enormous I am talking about a massive reduction. It's very effective.

[SJ77]

FYI I don't even allow BMP on my site in the first place.  It's pretty common knowledge that BMP file format makes for large files.

[Joel R]

I wholeheartedly agree with the original poster @superj707.  My website, and I think to a certain extent all forum communities, invariably finds itself with quite a few images attached to forum posts.  Like this HD photo right here, which was added for no other purpose than to be pretty and use up your bandwidth:

Offering a true thumbnail can help improve on the speed and performance of the website.  

I'd like to further point out that this functionality is already built-in to IP.Gallery (at least IP.Gallery for the 3.x series with Thumbnail, Small, Medium Large), so it's not a new or unusual request.  I passionately support this idea for IPS 4.

 

And just to make my point again, I'm going to add some more photos.  

 

 

Dare to dream.  Because you won't be doing much else while the page loads the full-size photos.  

[Schot]

Oh...  Wow.  Yah, that is a problem.  I would have assumed the functionality would have worked here the same as I'm accustomed to on any mediawiki site.  Wikipedia, Wikia, etc...  It's disconcerting to right click-->View Image(in firefox) on adonismale's thumbnails in his post above and see the resulting larger image.  This is a waste of bandwidth.  Granted it also means less demand on server resources/cpu which I guess would translate to a more responsive forum at the expense of hemorrhaging bandwidth.  Uh...  Eh heh.  Personally.  I can afford to experience some delays on my forum but I can't afford to be forced into having to pay for a more expensive hosting package because of a lack of a thumbnailing process.  As I understand it;  An HD gaming screenshot(typically a bare minimum of 300kb to 2mb) posted as a thumbnail to a width of 200px(which "should" be about 20-50kb) will still bleed 300kb to 2mb?  That would be bad.  Berry berry bad.  Badberry!

 

As a method to conserve resources and speed performance, this is great!  But the choice should be provided to the admin as to whether or not to employ this strategy or to engage a thumbnail tool(ImageMagick) that saves thumbnails to disk as opposed to stretching/squishing image dimensions such as it is here.

 

How do other forum software thumbnail?

 

On an image page of Mediawiki we can see what we're after.  On this linked to page on Mediawiki...  Scroll just a little down to File History and look for this thumbnail:

It's the image that is this exact same size as the above.  Not the big one at the top of the page.  Now.  If you left click on the thumbnail you are directed to a page that renders a full size version of that thumbnail.  If you right click-->View Image(Firefox) the thumbnail it will render the actual thumbnail on a page by itself.  And it will be the same size as the thumbnail.  Meaning it's a "real" thumbnail.  If you right click and view file info of the full size version versus the thumbnail version you'll see a big difference in file size.  Thumbnail is about 4KB.  Full size is about 112KB.  And that's for a very simple non HD image.  Those, like me, who are nearing the edge of their hosting bandwidth allowable limit should probably look more closely at this as a determining factor on whether to go ahead with 4.0. 

 

Hope I understood and explained this problem correctly.  If I didn't then I do apologize!

[eshayem]

testing

[Makoto]

​

Reducing the physical dimensions of an image regardless of format DOES reduce file size. It's just an indisputable fact. I have already been doing this on my website for 3 years, so I know it's a workable strategy.  Taking the quality to 80% and reducing the file size combined has had an enormous impact on the file sizes being downloaded and on my over all bandwidth usage. When I say enormous I am talking about a massive reduction. It's very effective.

​While I do in part understand what you're saying, if bandwidth is really your primary concern here, it makes far more sense to specify a maximum filesize. Yes, scaling an image down does reduce its file size, as does reducing the quality of the image. This is all very obvious. Larger, higher quality images take up more space.

But an images file size varies wildly depending on how complex the image is and how it was saved, both of which have more of an impact than the images raw dimensions. You can have a very large, but very simplistic/lower quality lossy JPEG image that exceeds your forums maximum allowed image dimensions even though it is only 375KB in size. Then you could also have a small, but highly complex photo that someone took, re-saved and dumped onto your forum as a pointless lossless PNG that's 8MB in size, however it would still be below your forums maximum allowed image dimensions and therefor remain untouched.

Enforcing image size restrictions only works as a flawed guesstimate method, and there's not really an easy or resource friendly way of having uploaded images "scale to fit" your forums maximum allowed filesize. You'd be running a loop of "is this image too large? Okay, scale it down. Is this image still too large? Okay..", or you'd have to implement some other complex programming logic that would still likely be a large resource hog.

You might also just have bloated lossless images converted to lossy jpegs at a set maximum width x height, but this is still a really imperfect solution that would probably just confuse clients if you tried to offer it to them as an option.

[Tom_K]

I pointed out this issue on the IPS4 demo board since this holds true for all IPS applications.

Even user's avatars and photos are only resized in HTML while the actual photos are larger. My attachment in this post shows the real size of images displayed as avatars in this topic. Instead of creating actural smaller versions of the photos, the images are just resized in HTML. Not only does this use more bandwdith and longer load times but the images resized in HTML look worse than if they were actually resized. The edges are more rough. Resizing images only in HTML to use as thumbnail has been a no-no since forever so I am surprised about IPS' decision for this solution.

I ran into a similar issue in IP.Content v3 when I added an article image and wanted to have a thumbnail version of that image (to use in the Recent articles block for example). There was no option for this and I doubt there is one in the new version.

Even in IP.Gallery v4 the images displayed as thumbnails are just full size images resized in HTML.

This causes more bandwidth usage and slower page load times.

I think every image upload in any of the IPS applications should be resized to smaller versions right away and be available for use throughout the entire community. The admin could set the preferred thumbnail sizes. The screenshot @opentype posted from his Wordpress blog is exactly what I'm talking about. Create thubmnails right away and have the option to use them any time.

From what I've seen so far, IPS 4 is a rewrite of the code with basically the same features as v3 and I understand the authors are proud of it but as a user I expect it to be as good or better than competing software that has great features which are missing from IPS4 or are much more awkward in IPS than they should be.

Sometimes trying to reinvent something that has already been solved is not the best idea. IPS should copy more solutions and features from other software and improve on that.

[opentype]

​

But an images file size varies wildly depending on how complex the image is and how it was saved, both of which have more of an impact than the images raw dimensions. You can have a very large, but very simplistic/lower quality lossy JPEG image that exceeds your forums maximum allowed image dimensions even though it is only 375KB in size. Then you could also have a small, but highly complex photo that someone took, re-saved and dumped onto your forum as a pointless lossless PNG that's 8MB in size, however it would still be below your forums maximum allowed image dimensions and therefor remain untouched.

Enforcing image size restrictions only works as a guesstimate at best, and there's not really an easy or resource friendly way of having uploaded images "scale to fit" your forums maximum allowed upload size.

​

I think we need to consider image file size and image dimensions separately. The arguments get blurry if you mix the two. 

1. File size should be reasonable. 

Therefore we might need a way to downscale on upload, which can dramatically reduce the file size. The sheer file size of “raw” camera pictures is often just not needed in a forum discussion. Scaling it down to like 800 or 1000 pixels max (for example) will of course still create very different file sizes, but never something like a 10 MB images raw image we want to avoid. The file sizes become different, but “reasonable“ for the intended use. That’s the point. It isn’t a about the image being 50 KB or 250 KB, it’s about being NOT 7 MB and having a rather small size in general. 

2. Image dimensions should be reasonable.

This is totally independent from the file size consideration. The image size needs to be in a certain range to make sense in the layout, especially if you have multiple images per post or article or view. The file size limit doesn’t give me ANY control over this. All images unnecessarily have a different size just to be fixed again through forced CSS declarations. Why not have optimal image dimensions instead of CSS fixes? 

As an example, take IP.Content databases: There can be things like album or book cover images used as a teaser image in a list view. I might show 50 or 100 of them on one page. A site-wide file size limit is totally pointless in this regard. I need actual thumbnails which the system generates – because I can’t require that all my users know how to do that themselves.  And I can’t load 100 hi-res images which are then downscaled to 100 pixels. I need different user-defined image sizes in different areas of the suite.  

So while the file size upload limit is useful, it doesn’t make downsizing of thumbnails and user-defined full-width sizes unnecessary. 

[opentype]

 

I think every image upload in any of the IPS applications should be resized to smaller versions right away and be available for use throughout the entire community. 

​I believe they are. The image dimension are just larger than the actual display size. The advantage is that the browser can cache each user image even though it appears in very different sizes in different areas of the suite. But it doesn’t load the actual full-size image that was being uploaded. Having such a larger image also allows easy CSS changes for the admins. If you want larger profile pictures in VNC, you just change the CSS and you don’t have to edit the core files so the system generates thousands of new images for this new profile picture size you just chose. 

[SJ77]

We need to clear a few things up in this thread.

Image dimensions are not purely a cosmetic thing...

 image dimensions DO matter when considering image file size.  It's actually the most important factor contributing to files size.

Lets forget about images for a second to help understand this. Let's say you have a giant NASA space shuttle... what's that weigh? A lot right?

Now lets say you have a 500:1 scale model of the same exact space shuttle. What's that weigh? a lot less!!!

Images are the same way, If you have a Jpeg that is 2500px X 2500px and you resize it (not scale it down using HTML) to1000px by 1000px you're going to have a much .. and I mean MUCH smaller image file size. This is a basic concept of image management and we need to understand this.

Yes, other things going into file size such as the amount of compression (quality) and how detailed the image is to begin with, but our best lever that we can pull to avoid our servers serving up massive file size images is to keep the image dimensions in check.

 

Now to the people who are arguing, "well let's just limit the file size users are allowed to upload in the first place." That is a horrible strategy for at least a couple of reasons, probably more.

1. Many users are noobs and don't know how to resize their fancy digital images fresh off of their 20Mega Pixel cameras. If they get rejected by the website they will simply give up and we will never have their contributions. Isn't one of the goals of IPB software to encourage participation from users? This is why we as web site owners should take the onus off of the user and manage it with a little technology and sophistication. I mean come on!

2. limiting upload size might be great for people starting new sites on IPB 4.0 .. but what about the rest of us. I have half a million images. I am not just going to dump them all because we can't get a proper image processor.

I honestly can't even believe this is up for debate in a next GEN forum software application. There ought to be an image processor that allows for proper image management.

The fact alone that this thing doesn't seem to be processing thumbnails is a huge miss for IPB.. I mean EPIC MISS

I am checking things and it appears that it's an HTML scale effect only. As far as I can tell still IPB cannot build thumbnails (not even for avatars)

This is a shame because the rest of IPB 4.0 appears to be incredible. No image processing is a disaster which I would argue makes IPB 4 unusable until it's fixed.

as stated earlier Abysmal!!

[Dark Shogun]

FYI I don't even allow BMP on my site in the first place.  It's pretty common knowledge that BMP file format makes for large files.

​I didn't say you allowed them on your site. I used BMP as an EXAMPLE to show that the file size can be reduced by the format w/o messing with the dimensions. If you are ok w/a quality loss than nevermind both of my above posts about the file format or size. .At this stage in development they probably will not add the feature you want. Only thing I can suggest is hiring a modder to create exactly what you want. Thats what I would do, personally, if I liked everything else about the software and wanted to continue using it. That is all I have to say on the matter.

Dark Shogun

[SJ77]

Dark Shogun,

I realize that your intentions are to be helpful so thank you. Let's just agree to stop responding to one another. I think that is the most amicable solution at this point.

For everyone else

the situation remains that we have a next gen forum software that doesn't even have image processing of any sort and cannot produce a real attachment image thumbnail. This is something I hope will be fixed soon or else we will be taking a step backwards with IPB 4.0 as opposed to forwards.

[opentype]

 

a next gen forum software that doesn't even have image processing of any sort and cannot produce a real attachment image thumbnail. 

​Well the system can do it. Your profile image for example is processed and scaled down to a reasonable size and they even improved it with a feature to select a part of the original image. It’s all there. But so far they are probably not convinced that more control of image sizes is needed for “content images” throughout the suite. 

[SJ77]

 

​Well the system can do it. Your profile image for example is processed and scaled down to a reasonable size and they even improved it with a feature to select a part of the original image. It’s all there. But so far they are probably not convinced that more control of image sizes is needed for “content images” throughout the suite. 

​Touche, However.. every major forum platform except this one can at the very least produce real thumbnails for image attachments. I honestly can't believe there is even a discussion about whether or not we need it. This should be industry standard at this point.

[JLS]

adding my discussion here as suggested by others...

In all the past suites we have our max image size set to 1500px wide. If an image is uploaded larger then the forum creates a new file sized appropriately. The problem is that it would strip the color profile leaving it with a generic RGB profile. I also believe it would degrade the quality of the image if I remember right. This really sucks for a forum like ours which is based around photography. 

Does 4.0 still do that or will it reserve with the same color profile as the original image. Even if it saves it to an sRGB would be great. But stripping the profile makes the image VERY inconsistent  and crappy on every different browser.

[SJ77]

JLS, you raise a good point. I checked into and 3.4.7 already does all of the things being requested in this thread. Seems like 4.0 should be a step forward not a step back.

[Makoto]

For what it's worth, regardless of what happens, I'm sure this is something that could be hooked anyways.

I could probably create a plugin that will scale images to a set maximum only if the upload filesize exceeds a specified limit. This could offer you protection against unnecessarily huge attachment submissions from cameras, without needlessly scaling and re-compressing larger images down when they're still of reasonable filesize.

I don't understand the conversation of thumbnails being created at this point. I was under the impression that thumbnails are (or should be) created for attachments but that doesn't seem to be the case. I absolutely agree that proper thumbnails (or perhaps a better term is "preview images") do need to be generated. There should be a maximum preview image size that is used for displaying attachment images in topics.

(Testing a large scanned image below to test how this behaves)

Edit: Welp it's just displaying the scaled image as the preview and full sized image.

So it's generating a good sized preview (here), but it's not displaying the full scale image (here) when viewing the image in the lightbox. This is either a bug or I'm still severely confused as to how this system is intended to work, I think this has to be a bug though.

[jaeitee]

Resizing a full image via HTML is not creating a thumbnail.  
Thumbnails are effectively downsized (both resolution and file size) previews of the greater/larger/original image.

The IP.4 suite is in some ways miles ahead in terms of integration in comparison to the competition, but then there's some fundamental basics that are just completely lacking.  Perhaps it's time to go look at the source code of Gallery2 from back in 2008 and see how their thumbnail generation / image resizing is done and get some inspiration.  It would be nice to think a decade after Ikonboard the basics of IPS Core would be done right, and that involves incredibly basic image management throughout the Gallery, Blogs and Forum.  

 

[munkiman]

This is basically a GD or image magick script, not sure why it's not utilized in 4? It's obviously a setting in the admin...

As far as profiles, pretty sure if you use the image magick instead, it retains the profile or should, by default. Not sure how GD works, never needed to code for it.

[SJ77]

Resizing a full image via HTML is not creating a thumbnail.  
Thumbnails are effectively downsized (both resolution and file size) previews of the greater/larger/original image.

The IP.4 suite is in some ways miles ahead in terms of integration in comparison to the competition, but then there's some fundamental basics that are just completely lacking.  Perhaps it's time to go look at the source code of Gallery2 from back in 2008 and see how their thumbnail generation / image resizing is done and get some inspiration.  It would be nice to think a decade after Ikonboard the basics of IPS Core would be done right, and that involves incredibly basic image management throughout the Gallery, Blogs and Forum.  

 

​this, for goodness sake this! !!

[munkiman]

Looks like GD does strip the profile at least in gallery, while image magick retains it. Not sure what the forum in 3 is using to re-sample the images, but it seems like it's just the GD 2 library since it strips out profiles in post attachments. Guess i could trance it in a debug or sift through the code.

Either way, it would be nice to have the option of using image magick across all modules, not just the gallery.

[munkiman]

​this, for goodness sake this! !!

​Theoretically, the workaround (at least in 3) is to use galleries (my media option) in a post to get an accurate thumbnail, but it's a lot of clicks to get to the full size image. And, of course use image magick instead of GD 2...