Gallery 4.3.x - Resize original image

[TVplaneta]

The problem is that it takes a lot of disk space on the server ...

Before 4.3.x, files resize to settings (my 1280pix) - 300-500KB

now - 5-15MB - not resizeble original photo

 

Add a function so that the administrator can choose whether to save the original images or not, please

[TVplaneta]

Please

[RomanV]

Yes, bumping this post - for big community this is unacceptable, my users load about 3,5 Gb crappy biggy images within 2 weeks, on previous board engine it was 100-150 mb... ok, 200 at max...  ) 

@TVplaneta may be you find the solution?....

[Ramsesx]

 

[RomanV]

@Ramsesx its cool, but original images are stored as well.  The only solution is limit users to say 500 kb per upload, but many of users do not want resize photos themself, they just passed by, it's NOT acceptable for such modern board engine not to have such simple option - do-not-store huge not-needed images, I guess. Thanks!

[TVplaneta]

On 12/1/2018 at 2:52 AM, RomanV said:

Yes, bumping this post - for big community this is unacceptable, my users load about 3,5 Gb crappy biggy images within 2 weeks, on previous board engine it was 100-150 mb... ok, 200 at max...  ) 

@TVplaneta may be you find the solution?....

not find

[RomanV]

Ok, we need simple php script, checking database from time to time, removing full size images and replacing in DB  images table filenames from full size to resized images. Anybody here can help?..

[bfarber]

The original image must be retained. You can quite easily break certain functionality or degrade the quality of your images if you do not retain the original image. There is no option to not retain the original image.

[RomanV]

@bfarber - this is not possible, my board have 230.000 images for now (5 years), and used disk space for these images - 25 GB.

When I move site to Invision - images forder grow 3.6 gb within 2 weeks, that mean 7.5 gb monthly, we just not need such disk space wasted for unused big pictures.

At least we need an option so original image will be resized during upload, it a must thing... My users are people low skilled in computers, asking them to resize an image to 500 kb before upload make no sense, they will leave my board.

Must be an option for clients who care about resources :))

[mdmx]

+1 I fully support the post above, this setting should be out of the box  We do not use the Gallery app because of this.

[kmk]

13 hours ago, RomanV said:

My users are people low skilled in computers, asking them to resize an image to 500 kb before upload make no sense

+1

Admin made ips site for final users, without final users, why still ips... So the point should be focused on final users experience, not admins or developers saying... 

[Maxxius]

I did not know this was an issue, but I truly believe there must be some way around this. Gallery can become such a space waster...

[SMN_Admin]

On 12/5/2018 at 12:49 AM, kmk said:

...So the point should be focused on final users experience...

Hello,

this is absolutely true. We in our community have exatly the same probelm: Users do not want to resize images by themselves, they expect the software to this job for them.
Therefore we as well would really like to get such a functionality in the gallery.

[Joel R]

On 12/3/2018 at 7:17 AM, bfarber said:

The original image must be retained. You can quite easily break certain functionality or degrade the quality of your images if you do not retain the original image. There is no option to not retain the original image.

I want to reiterate my support for image optimization at all levels, including the original.  

Our concerns are highly justified as admins.  Our users live in a world of Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr that provide automatic image resizing that's completely opaque to the end user, who is using the latest smartphones snapping better and bigger photos.  Our users simply don't know, don't care, and too lazy to optimize their 25 MB photo before uploading. An album of those photos has now permanently increased my Amazon S3 bill for the rest of my life.  

1. Convert image extensions like PNG into JPEG.  JPEG is usually a significantly smaller file size than PNG images, even at same dimensions.  

2. Allow us to resize the upper bound of 'original' images.  I have users who upload the original photographer images from photoshoots that are print-quality at dimensions of 4000 pixels.  Even if I resize my 'large' from 1280 to 1600 px, there's no way I'm ever going to benefit from 4000 px images.  

[The Old Man]

I can see both sides on this but aside from more flexibility, there should definitely be improvements to image handling in IPS in general, as a priority. It seems to have slipped by somehow, possibly due to when the AdminCP was 'dumbed down' a few years back when a lot of useful tools disappeared that could have been moved to advanced sections. Image optimisations such as automatic png to jpg, lossless optimisation of image quality and reducing as much as possible resizing of images via CSS are all possible with ImageMagick, GD2, http://www.libjpeg-turbo.org/ and http://optipng.sourceforge.net/ all make this possible. In fact, there is scope to add some basic image filter effects to Gallery for members to turn on or off.

The main thing that bothers me though, besides the horrible, enforced Gallery light box, confusing image urls with '?=download' in them and lack of integration with 3rd party image hosting like Google Photos, is that the basic HTML 101/W3C principle of always specifying image dimensions is so often overlooked throughout the software such as forum description image attachments leading to penalties. Perhaps this comes down to the perceived lack of interest in Pagespeed/GTMetrix related optimisation, which could be reversed into a strong USP for the product. Since Google announced SEO penalties for slow sites and less mobile first/friendly design, this could probably be taken a bit more seriously.

That said, Gallery is still the best image gallery software solution for hosting your images, even if you don't have the other apps.

[Maxxius]

ok while we wait can something like that be done manually?

I mean I download via ftp all the original images from ips gallery. batch run them myself to decrease their size and resolution/perhaps change the format and upload them back overwriting the original files. and repeat every few months.

would that be doable and worth doing?

[bfarber]

On 12/17/2018 at 12:56 PM, Joel R said:

I want to reiterate my support for image optimization at all levels, including the original.  

Our concerns are highly justified as admins.  Our users live in a world of Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr that provide automatic image resizing that's completely opaque to the end user, who is using the latest smartphones snapping better and bigger photos.  Our users simply don't know, don't care, and too lazy to optimize their 25 MB photo before uploading. An album of those photos has now permanently increased my Amazon S3 bill for the rest of my life.  

1. Convert image extensions like PNG into JPEG.  JPEG is usually a significantly smaller file size than PNG images, even at same dimensions.  

2. Allow us to resize the upper bound of 'original' images.  I have users who upload the original photographer images from photoshoots that are print-quality at dimensions of 4000 pixels.  Even if I resize my 'large' from 1280 to 1600 px, there's no way I'm ever going to benefit from 4000 px images.  

1. You can't convert PNG to JPEG. They're not apples to apples...PNG is a lossless image format while JPEG is a lossy format.

2. It sounds like you're asking for an option to apply max dimension changes to existing images here. If so, that's possible (though it only applies to thumbnails).

On 12/18/2018 at 2:16 AM, The Old Man said:

I can see both sides on this but aside from more flexibility, there should definitely be improvements to image handling in IPS in general, as a priority. It seems to have slipped by somehow, possibly due to when the AdminCP was 'dumbed down' a few years back when a lot of useful tools disappeared that could have been moved to advanced sections. Image optimisations such as automatic png to jpg, lossless optimisation of image quality and reducing as much as possible resizing of images via CSS are all possible with ImageMagick, GD2, http://www.libjpeg-turbo.org/ and http://optipng.sourceforge.net/ all make this possible. In fact, there is scope to add some basic image filter effects to Gallery for members to turn on or off.

GD2 does not really offer a way to reduce file size without loosing quality, honestly. The other things you mention aren't always available.

The real problem is, to do this often requires a human "eye" to verify if there are differences. You can run images through various services and softwares to reduce the file size, but without a human to review you can't easily tell if the end result is the same thing you put in. I have seen images get quite corrupted (pixelated, etc.) when trying to optimize them. You'll note many services have a slider that allows you to adjust how compressed the end result is for that reason...so you (as a human) can see if what you're getting is "good enough" or not, and adjust accordingly.

On 12/18/2018 at 2:16 AM, The Old Man said:

The main thing that bothers me though, besides the horrible, enforced Gallery light box, confusing image urls with '?=download' in them and lack of integration with 3rd party image hosting like Google Photos, is that the basic HTML 101/W3C principle of always specifying image dimensions is so often overlooked throughout the software such as forum description image attachments leading to penalties. Perhaps this comes down to the perceived lack of interest in Pagespeed/GTMetrix related optimisation, which could be reversed into a strong USP for the product. Since Google announced SEO penalties for slow sites and less mobile first/friendly design, this could probably be taken a bit more seriously.

That said, Gallery is still the best image gallery software solution for hosting your images, even if you don't have the other apps.

When you're talking about image attachments, we're no longer talking about Gallery.

That said, a lot of times it's simply not possible to do. We use a responsive layout, so that same image which maxes out the size of the post area on desktop does the same on mobile. That might be 1000px on desktop, and 300px on mobile. You can't just embed width and height parameters in the HTML for that simple reason.

 

The ultimate problem is the "copy of a copy" effect that you will end up with if the original image is not stored. Every time you make a copy of a copy, the new copy looses some detail. This may be ok the first, or second, or third time you make a copy of the copy, but at some point you loose enough quality that the problem becomes noticeable, and without the originally uploaded image you can never get back to a point where the image displayed is acceptable. This isn't accounting for future technology changes (when everyone has 8K screens and so on). Or bugs (a typo causes an image to get mangled, but now we have no original image to fix the problem once the bug is identified and resolved). Or site policy changes (watermarks or not?).

Trust me, as a hosting provider ourselves we understand the balance between performance and user experience and storage space. 

[Joel R]

48 minutes ago, bfarber said:

. You can't convert PNG to JPEG. They're not apples to apples...PNG is a lossless image format while JPEG is a lossy format.

You can convert PNG to JPG.  I do it all the time prior to uploading.  

48 minutes ago, bfarber said:

Trust me, as a hosting provider ourselves we understand the balance between performance and user experience and storage space.

You offer relatively very little storage space in your cloud options for your price points, basically forcing your cloud users to offshore any sizeable amount of storage to Amazon S3.  The TCO of your cloud is higher than what you let on.  

[bfarber]

48 minutes ago, Joel R said:

You can convert PNG to JPG.  I do it all the time prior to uploading. 

I apologize, I see how my post was not very clear.

From a technical perspective, yes you can convert the two formats.

But from an implementation perspective, you can't. Some users may find it perfectly acceptable to convert the two formats interchangeably, however we have many clients that run communities very interested in high quality graphics, and when you convert a PNG image to a JPG image you're almost certainly going to lose quality and introduce artifacts. The two image formats have different goals, and what I was intending to say was that we can't simply convert one format to the other with file size being the only consideration.

It would be akin to going to the store to purchase Coca Cola and finding out you got store brand Cola in your checkout bag. They may be "interchangeable" but not everyone is going to see it that way and accept either as equivalent to the other.

 

 

I understand the concerns about file storage, and am not dismissing them. I am just discussing specific solutions that have been put forth and explaining why they may not work as an overall solution to the concern raised. I think there may be other solutions to address the concern instead (e.g. adding support for something like Glacier to store the original images, or perhaps gzipping the original image files before storing them). There are challenges and limits to the functionality we can provide if we do not retain the original images, however, and most serious photography sites would run into quality issues over the long-term if the original image is not retained. Even if presented as a setting, an administrator who is not fully aware of the implications could easily say "yeah sure reduce the storage space I use by resizing the original image" (or not storing it) only to find out that in fact they need it for some reason down the road, but at which point you can never get it back.

[orp]

vBulletin 3, 4, 5 all resize uploaded images that are larger than an admin specified dimension, using GD or ImageMagick. i recently migrated to IPS4 and just assumed that any modern community software would work this way (i know, my bad). 

anyway, i just realized the lack of this sort of feature is why i'm suddenly running out of space with my host after moving to IPS. membership and traffic are still growing at our normal slow rate, yet disk storage consumption suddenly grew by leaps and bounds. ridiculous!

[orp]

On 12/19/2018 at 10:57 AM, bfarber said:

I understand the concerns about file storage, and am not dismissing them. I am just discussing specific solutions that have been put forth and explaining why they may not work as an overall solution to the concern raised. I think there may be other solutions to address the concern instead (e.g. adding support for something like Glacier to store the original images, or perhaps gzipping the original image files before storing them). There are challenges and limits to the functionality we can provide if we do not retain the original images, however, and most serious photography sites would run into quality issues over the long-term if the original image is not retained. Even if presented as a setting, an administrator who is not fully aware of the implications could easily say "yeah sure reduce the storage space I use by resizing the original image" (or not storing it) only to find out that in fact they need it for some reason down the road, but at which point you can never get it back.

so the justification for not addressing these concerns is that admins are too stupid to handle any options that could have significant implications?!? that would mean you should just eliminate 90% of the admin settings.

having a basic community gallery feature while not absolutely murdering my hosting storage space allotment seems like a reasonable and straightforward use-case. not to mention it's very technically doable as proven by other common forum software that has been around for 10 years or more.

[RomanV]

Nothing changed yet... So pity - normal simple option as other board software have for years - resize images saved on HDD.