Is there a way to display so many images ? Maybe something like google maps, that would show all images at once as tiles and you could zoom in and see the picture in detail... ?
This problem can be easily solved by merging all images side by side like a collage.
This task can be automated by using python using its pyautogui module and any simple software for image manipulation.
By doing this a single image of very high resolution can be obtained achieving your purpose.
(Although the size of the image would be mind blowing.)
See these sites for similar works (1.2 Billion images) but with smarter solution (the are loading few images at a time upon zooming).
All 1.2-Billion Facebook Profile Pictures On One Page
The Face of Facebook
Ok, it took very long time to process and finish, but I made it ! It CAN be done. correct tools are libvips and its python version pyvips I managed to get all 366 000+ pictures in one, and then made zoomable pyramid dzi with it ! To display it OpenSeadragon since the final picture was 81GB and nothing can open that.... http://deepzoom.reverz.sk/ ( also not sure why my question was down voted :-/ )
For each record, I have two images, small and large size. What is the best way to show an image size according to the size of the screen?
I know I can use css and mediaquery and show the small or large image using a div display none / block, but in this way, I understand that the user has downloaded both images even if they are not displayed, is that correct? Then, the page load increases. If so, what is the best option to do this?
For this problem the most efficient way is using the User-Agent to detect if a client is desktop, tablet or mobile.
I prefer to use Mobile_Detect or jenssegers/agent (based on Mobile_Detect).
Edit
Recently I installed the Google Pagespeed Module on my server. There is a filter, resize_rendered_image_dimensions, that returns images with sizes of the current client view (exactly what you are looking for).
Some other implementation would be lazyloading with Javascript and adding dimensions to the requested url depending on the viewport sizes.
I'm writing a windows store app, which uses a zoomable/pannable div to show a large image and allow a user to locate specific sections within the image.
Through this work I've been provided an (admittedly huge) image (from a design house) which does not render when set as the img.src (loaded via a blob from a storage file object). It just shows a plain white screen where the image should be.
The image in question is > 35000 pixels wide and about 11000 high.
I've established that re-saving the image (as large as Fireworks would let me!) with a 10000 pixel width renders as expected.
I'd like to go back to the design guys and let them know the maximum size that the app will support, but I can't find this information anywhere.
Does anyone have any ideas as to the limits here?
I'm creating a magazine to read on an iPad and am having problems with creating readable pages. What size (DPI and MB) should my files be? And I'm doing an export from InDesign, are there any suggested steps that should be taken here?
The iPad display is at 132 PPI.
The iPad display is 1024 x 768 - I'd recommend making your images that size.
That's right, the image size for iPad is by default 1024x768, but I recommend you to create your file in 1152x1536 px if you want to zoom-in in your image on iPad end keep a good quality of display.
Are you creating a pdf of the entire document or saving the pages as images? You may also want to consider the way users will be accessing the document (online, each page downloaded or as an application) If it is an application you will be able to have larger page sizes. If online, then download size will definitely become a factor in how it looks. If you shrink the quality too much, your rendered text will be the first thing on the page to suffer.
Have you done any research into what you find a comfortable to read text size (i.e., with popular science, wired, or project magazines? Another one to check is digital2.0 or the first of the RAW applications which was put out) These magazine apps use scrolling text regions in a lot of cases, but you can at least see how they use fonts and how comfortable they will be at different sizes.
my company has recently started to get problems with the image handling for our websites.
We have several websites (adult entertainment) that display images like dvd covers, snapshots and similar. We have about 100'000 movies and for each movie we have an average of 30 snapshots + covers. Almost every image has an additional version with blurring and overlay for non-members, this results in about 50 images per movie or a total of 5 million base images. Each of the images is available in several versions, depending on where it's placed on the page (thumbnail, original, small preview, not-so-small preview, small image in the top-list, etc.) which results in more images than i cared to count.
Now i had the idea to use a server to generate the images on-the-fly since it became quite clumsy to generate all the different images for all the different pages (as different pages sometimes even need different image sizes for basically the same task).
Does anyone know of an image processing server that can scale down images on-the-fly so we only need to provide the original images and the web guys can just request whatever size they need?
Requirements:
Very High performance (Several thousand users per day)
On-the-fly blurring and overlay creation
On-the-fly resize (with and without keeping aspect ratio)
Can handle millions of images
Must be able to read JPG, GIF, PNG and BMP and convert between them
Security is not that much of a concern as i.e. the unblurred images can already be reached by URL manipulation and more security would be nice but it's not required and frankly i stopped caring (After failing to get into my coworkers heads why (for our small reseller page) it's a bad idea to use http://example.com/view_image.php?filename=/data/images/01020304.jpg to display the images).
We tried PHP scripts to do this but the performance was too slow for this many users.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions you have.
I suggest you set up a dedicated web server to handle image resize and serve the final result. I have done something similar, although on a much smaller scale. It basically eliminates the process of checking for the cache.
It works like this:
you request the image appending the required size to the filename like http://imageserver/someimage.150x120.jpg
if the image exists, it will be returned with no other processing (this is the main point, the cache check is implicit)
if the image does not exist, handle the 404 not found via .htaccess and reroute the request to the script that generates the image of the required size
in the script specify the list of allowed sizes to avoid attacks like scripts requesting every possible size to shut your server down
keep this on a cookieless domain to minimize unnecessary traffic
EDIT: I don't think that PHP itself would slow the process much, as PHP scripting in this case is reduced to a minimum: the image scaling is done by a builtin library written in C. Whatever you do you'll have to use a library like this (GD or libmagick or so) so that's unavoidable. With my system at least you totally skip the overhead of checking the cache, thus further reducing PHP interaction. You can implement this on your existing server, so I guess it's a solution well suited for your budget.
Based on
We tried PHP scripts to do this but the performance was too slow for this many users.
I'm going to assume you weren't caching the results. I'd recommend caching the resulting images for a day or two (i.e. have your script check to see if the thumbnail has already been generated, if so use it, if it hasn't generate it on the fly).
This would improve performance dramatically as I'd imagine the main/start page probably has a lot more hits than random video X, thus when viewing the main page no images have to be created as they're cached. When User Y views Movie X, they won't notice the delay as much since it just has to generate that one page.
For the "On-the-fly resize" aspect - how important is bandwidth to you? I'd want to assume you're going through so much with movies that a few extra kb in images per request wouldn't do too much harm. If that's the case, you could just use larger images and set the width and height and let the browser do the scaling for you.
The ImageCache and Image Exact Sizes solutions from the Drupal community might do this, and like most solutions OSS use the libraries from ImageMagik
There are some AMI images for Amazons EC2 service to do image scaling. It used Amazon S3 for image storage, original and scales, and could feed them through to Amazons CDN service (Cloud Front). Check on EC2 site for what's available
Another option is Google. Google docs now supports all file types, so you can load the images up to a Google docs folder, and share the folder for public access. The URL's are kind of long e.g.
http://lh6.ggpht.com/VMLEHAa3kSHEoRr7AchhQ6HEzHVTn1b7Mf-whpxmPlpdrRfPW216UhYdQy3pzIe4f8Q7PKXN79AD4eRqu1obC7I
Add the =s paramter to scale the image, cool! e.g. for 200 pixels wide
http://lh6.ggpht.com/VMLEHAa3kSHEoRr7AchhQ6HEzHVTn1b7Mf-whpxmPlpdrRfPW216UhYdQy3pzIe4f8Q7PKXN79AD4eRqu1obC7I=s200
Google only charge USD5/year for 20GB. There is a full API for uploading docs etc
Other answers on SO
How best to resize images off-server
Ok first problem is that resizing an image with any language takes a little processing time. So how do you support thousands of clients? We'll you cache it so you only have to generate the image once. The next time someone asks for that image, check to see if it has already been generated, if it has just return that. If you have multiple app servers then you'll want to cache to a central file-system to increase your cache-hit ratio and reduce the amount of space you will need.
In order to cache properly you need to use a predictable naming convention that takes into account all the different ways that you want your image displayed, i.e. use something like myimage_blurred_320x200.jpg to save a jpeg that has been blurred and resized to 300 width and 200 height, etc.
Another approach is to sit your image server behind a proxy server that way all the caching logic is done automatically for you and your images are served by a fast, native web server.
Your not going to be able to serve millions of resized images any other way. That's how Google and Bing maps do it, they pre-generate all the images they need for the world at different pre-set extents so they can provide adequate performance and be able to return pre-generated static images.
If php is too slow you should consider using the 2D graphic libraries from Java or .NET as they are very rich and can support all your requirements. To get a flavour of the Graphics API here is a method in .NET that will resize any image to the new width or height specified. If you omit a height or width, it will resize maintaining the right aspect ratio. Note Image can be a created from a JPG, GIF, PNG or BMP:
// Creates a re-sized image from the SourceFile provided that retails the same aspect ratio of the SourceImage.
// - If either the width or height dimensions is not provided then the resized image will use the
// proportion of the provided dimension to calculate the missing one.
// - If both the width and height are provided then the resized image will have the dimensions provided
// with the sides of the excess portions clipped from the center of the image.
public static Image ResizeImage(Image sourceImage, int? newWidth, int? newHeight)
{
bool doNotScale = newWidth == null || newHeight == null; ;
if (newWidth == null)
{
newWidth = (int)(sourceImage.Width * ((float)newHeight / sourceImage.Height));
}
else if (newHeight == null)
{
newHeight = (int)(sourceImage.Height * ((float)newWidth) / sourceImage.Width);
}
var targetImage = new Bitmap(newWidth.Value, newHeight.Value);
Rectangle srcRect;
var desRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, newWidth.Value, newHeight.Value);
if (doNotScale)
{
srcRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, sourceImage.Width, sourceImage.Height);
}
else
{
if (sourceImage.Height > sourceImage.Width)
{
// clip the height
int delta = sourceImage.Height - sourceImage.Width;
srcRect = new Rectangle(0, delta / 2, sourceImage.Width, sourceImage.Width);
}
else
{
// clip the width
int delta = sourceImage.Width - sourceImage.Height;
srcRect = new Rectangle(delta / 2, 0, sourceImage.Height, sourceImage.Height);
}
}
using (var g = Graphics.FromImage(targetImage))
{
g.SmoothingMode = SmoothingMode.HighQuality;
g.InterpolationMode = InterpolationMode.HighQualityBicubic;
g.DrawImage(sourceImage, desRect, srcRect, GraphicsUnit.Pixel);
}
return targetImage;
}
In the time that this question has been asked, a few companies have sprung up to deal with this exact issue. It is not an issue that's isolated to you or your company. Many companies reach the point where they need to look for a more permanent solution for their image processing needs.
Services like imgix serve as a proxy and CDN for image operations like resizing and applying overlays. By manipulating the URL, you can apply different transformations to each image. imgix serves billions of requests per day.
You can also stand up services on your own and put them behind a CDN. Open source projects like imageproxy are good for this. This puts the burden of maintenance on your operations team.
(Disclaimer: I work for imgix.)
What you are looking for is best matched by Thumbor http://thumbor.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html , which is open source, backed by a huge company (means it will not disappear tomorrow), and ships with a lot of nice features like detecting what is important on an image when cropping.
For low-cost plus CDN I'd suggest to combine it with Cloudfront and AWS storage, or a comparable solution with a free CDN like Cloudflare. These might not be the best performing CDN providers, but at least still perform better than one server and also offload your image server on the cheap. Plus, it will save you a TON of bandwidth cost.
If each different image is uniquely identifiable by a single URL then I'd simply use a CDN such as AKAMAI. Let your PHP script do the job and let AKAMAI handle the load.
Since this kind of business doesn't usually have budget problems, that'd be the only place I'd look at.
Edit: that works only if you do find a CDN that will serve this kind of content for you.
This exact same problem is now being solved by image resize services dedicated to this task. They provide following features:
In built CDN - you need not worry about image distribution
Image resize on the fly - any size needed is available
No storage needed - you just store base image and all variants are handled by service
Ecosystem libraries - you can just include javascript and your job is done for all devices and all browsers.
One such service is Gumlet. You can also try some open source alternative like nginx plugin which can also resize image on the fly.
(I work for Gumlet.)