[Gallery] Large images as thumbnails

[Shehi]

I will be very short with my report:

A - Gallery category album listing OR Gallery homepage : THUMBNAILS ARE OK!

 

 

B - Album View, instead thumbnails we have real size images : NOT OK

 

Please fix this in the next release. Thanks!

P.S.: This situation has nothing to do with themes. Default theme has the same problem.

P.P.S.: Images are from lodgeofsorceresses.com

[bfarber]

I just want to be sure - is the issue that you're reporting that the thumbnail isn't used in the album view (the larger image is)?

[optrexnz]

I think we need to be a lot cuter with images across IPB. Correct sizing, lazy loading, conversion to webp or similar would help tremendously.

[Shehi]

On 12/3/2018 at 2:18 PM, bfarber said:

I just want to be sure - is the issue that you're reporting that the thumbnail isn't used in the album view (the larger image is)?

That's correct, @bfarber

[Shehi]

@bfarber, @Matt etc: You guys know we are wasting money on bandwidth because of this issue, right? 4.4 is out, yet the problem remains :(

[kmk]

On 12/10/2018 at 5:16 PM, optrexnz said:

I think we need to be a lot cuter with images across IPB. Correct sizing, lazy loading, conversion to webp or similar would help tremendously.

https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OGC.0d4818c160f8aa8f5fde1beed1acfde2&pid=Api&rurl=https%3a%2f%2fmedia.giphy.com%2fmedia%2frAKIEXmwAeHHq%2fgiphy.gif&ehk=drddfhoHUXuUMhL6J1xW0w

[The Old Man]

Surely, if the suite needs 6 different sizes of an uploaded image whether it be for faster performance of page loading or to save bandwidth, then there should be 6 created by the suite. If it needs 8, it should have 8, before the software chooses the nearest appropriate size if none exists. Simples. 

But, then you'll have people with millions of images complaining that instead of paying to host say 3 million images, they now need to pay for 6 million images or what have you. So would they save on bandwidth costs or would the cost of the extra storage outweigh the cost of the extra bandwidth? 

So I think either there has to be either this current compromise (a limited set number of sizes), or perhaps add another single size somewhere between, or just give admins the full set of options so they can choose their preference for the individual needs of their particular site.

The funny thing or perhaps the irony of all this, is that broadband speed and availability have increased so much since the days of 33.6k dial up modems, and 4k displays and retina devices are becoming ever more popular, yet all the emphasis these days is on faster loading and more and more excruciating optimisation. The fact that Google rarely follow their own stipulated Pagespeed/Lighthouse requirements with their own libraries that everyone includes into their sites, despite the threat of them reducing your Google search ranking, is the bittersweet icing/frosting on the cake.

So how far do you really take all this, before it all gets too ridiculous?

[bfarber]

We used to store 4 or 5 sizes of images in Gallery, and we got complaints that storage costs were high because you had to store so many different size copies of the Gallery image (and, then, those would all be transferred to the end user in different views throughout the Suite, so you paid the bandwidth too).

Now we store just a couple of different sizes. You have less storage as a result. We then transfer the images to the end users, but assuming you have set up appropriate caching headers for your files the images would only be transferred once and cached by the user's browser. i.e. now you may send 2 copies of an image to a user's browser, instead of 5, so even though you might have a larger size in a handful of views than is absolutely needed, it's one image sent to the user as they browse around, instead of 200x200 copy here, one 400x400 copy there, and one 800x800 copy somewhere else. Ultimately, again assuming you set up caching headers properly, it should be a net bandwidth savings.

I only mention this to point out that there's a delicate balance between bandwidth, storage, and doing things "proper" (i.e. creating a different size copy for each and every possible scenario). The latter sounds good on paper, but in the real world it means higher storage costs (or CPU costs, if generating images on the fly which tends to be quite slow), and higher bandwidth costs....even though you're sending a smaller image, you have to send multiple different copies instead of just one used in different scenarios loaded from the user's browser cache.

[Shehi]

I don't understand how this topic reached the point of 8 versions of images - but the only thing I care about is showing thumbs on Album view. The same way it is done in Album-list screen. Simpl

[The Old Man]

Well its called discussion and 8 images was just an example.

Perhaps you could try comparing the theme templates for both of the views and see which image size code you need to replicate in the album view template?

Also, a few other suggestions:

• in terms of bandwidth, you could run your site through Cloudflare for extra caching, security and performance which would in turn save bandwidth.
• Your Gallery homepage is a massive 17MB, which is pretty terrible even for an image based page. Some of the Gallery sections are 10MB a page.
• GTMetrix is giving your Gallery a F(0) rating for Pagespeed, I've never seen a score that low before, so there's definitely some optimisation you could look into. https://gtmetrix.com/reports/lodgeofsorceresses.com/DubVE4DV#
• It appears to be using Amazon S3 for off site storage, you could try combining with Cloudfront or another CDN if you're not using one already as serving images directly from S3 buckets is slow and expensive.