Magento Static Photo Url's and different size photos - image

I am trying to link to product photos on my magento installation and have a few questions. What I would like to do is have a standardized url, where I provide the width and SKU and Magento generates the photo.
I believe this is built in to Magento, but can not find the documentation. I want to be able to link to a photo like this (and use the magento cache as well).
http://mysite.com/media/photos/600x600/MYSKU.jpg
How can I tell magento to generate a 600x600 photo at a known url for a given product? I am also using One Pica for CDN to S3/Cloudfront, but that portion shouldn't really be affected.

Magento does have facilities for resizing images, but it typically does so as they are requested by other pages. The catalog/image helper, for instance, can help with this.
If you need to have arbitrary images output by the framework, you'll need to write a controller action for this to generate the newly resized images before returning them. Let me know if you need more detail on that front, but basically, you just need an action that parses the format request and creates the newly resized image on demand.
Your CDN wouldn't be affected in this case, though you could be clever about it and actually serve the assets from the CDN if you wanted to. In that case, you would generate the image, upload it to the CDN on the fly, and then return a 302 response for the resource.
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Joe

Related

Lightbox2: Display other picture if named image is lost

I have a lot galleries displayed with Lightbox2 and it works fine.
Now I want to delete the larger version of the pictures, but keep the gallery with the thumbnails for visitors.
How can I manage, that lightbox2 displays an alternative image, if the given file in the html is not existing?
I couldn't find an option in lightbox.js to handle with missing targets.
I had the same question, but after a little research I decided that Lightbox2 is not the right place to handle missing images. Instead, that should be handled at the server or application level.
The web server will respond with a 404 error for any missing resource, whether a web page, image, or anything else. In most cases, it also returns a small HTML page to alert the user (such as this example at Google).
You can usually configure your server or application to return a default 404-style image instead of an HTML page if the requested resource was an image. That will then be displayed to the user instead of the broken image symbol.
How you do this of course depends on the particular server/application stack you are using, but here is a good solution for Apache.

Docpad design considerations

I'm coming from a php/mysql background. I'm most familiar with the Kohana PHP framework and I'm trying to learn Docpad. I have a loose understand at this point and I've built out my first website and blog. Static content makes a lot of sense to me on Docpad.
I'm working on my photography site where I want to be able to upload new images to a portfolio. The backend needs to handle an uploaded high-resolution image and create several different copies at different resolutions of the image. My biggest question is how do I keep track of the image meta data that I want to display? Do I generate a physical file for each image that has all the particulars I want to track and use those files as my searchable database, much like how blog posts are setup?
Or should I go the route of using something like MongoDB to store image data there where it can be queried and plugged into a layout?
Regarding handling POST or GET data, should I be reading up on the express.js docs? I'm not really sure where to turn for that.
Wordpress uses TimThumb to re-size it's images: How does WordPress.com resize images dynamically?
Then there is this re-sizing library for node: node package for file attachments and image resizing
If you wanted to created like 3 different image sizes and use the backbone collection in DocPad, then you'd add your different re-sized images to those three different collections/folders. For access the images you might just be able to do it via it's file name. So when you copy, re-size and rename the image, in the rename step, concat the image size at the end, like: coolPhoto-med.jpg and then you could just do hard links to get to the image like /spring-collection/med/coolPhoto-med.jpg or you could use query engine to access them.
The file model has a meta attribute: https://github.com/bevry/docpad/blob/master/src/lib/models/file.coffee#L17
I've yet to learn how to use it yet though.
I know we chatted yesterday on #docpad IRC but I just wanted to answer you here too. If you do code something that re-sizes images for DocPad, please do consider putting it up on Github to share with the community.

Challenges in loading images from CDN on multiple host name for e-Commerce site built on Nopcommerce

I am working on a ecommerce site built on the top of Nop Commerce 2.3. We want to use CDN for loading all static contents including its images, but not sure how to do this with NopCommerce.
Nopcommerce is set to save binary of images in db at the time of inserting product, and then it generates thumb or re-sized / optimized images at the run time as and when required and stored them in the content folder of the same application for retrieving on page during load time.
Now, suppose on some page, lets say, Home Page, we have 70 product images. I want to distribute it across four host name, so each host name will serve 17/18 images.
This is definitely to save some time in image loading.
Now the Question is:
How to do it in best way in NopCommerce?
The challenges are:
Changing in nop commerce code to load images from CDN instead of its application\content folder. This is not an issue and is fine to manage.
To implement this correctly we might need some mechanism that checks for image on CDN if it doesn't exist, then we might need to transfer the image from content folder to appropriate folder at CDN maybe ? (suggest), and if it doesn't exist in content folder, then need to generate suitable image first and then transfer it.
I'm concerned about this 2nd challenge, and wants to understand the best approach to do this. Moreover, how to do this... specifically check if image exists in CDN or not?
Not very much sure, how to do this? And is it okay or do you suggest something else?
If you use the OVH CDN, you simply point your dns to the CDN dns, add the static file's extensions to the CDN configuration, and let it work for you. All other extensions will pass through. No code to change.

magento image path [thoughts please]

We host our Magento store internally with a not so amazing Internet connection. It's good enough to process the shop, but images take a while to upload to the visitor.
So what we have done is tweak the image.php file in app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model to point the images to a public space on RackSpace.
It's not an ideal method though with the admin console complaining that images don't exist and other random mess ups.
So I was wondering if anyone has implemented such a solution which I can use for our shop?
I imagine it will need to ignore the cache check as it cant upload to rackspace.
You can use the option of the backend of Magento
And redirect the trafic of images to another server(CDN).
There is one more solution, for example the module of one pica CDN with the option to select many CDN( amazon, custom cdn, etc)
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/onepica-imagecdn.html

CDN for executable files

On my new site, I display around 50-60 thumbnails per page using my one of the plugin.
About plugin:
For every requested post id, it
extracts content for the post from
DB and find out the image url.
It generates thumbnail for found
image URL.
I wanted to minimize number of hits to the server in generating the thumbnail. If server is cache enabled then it can reduce many of the hits. But i was willing to separate the 2nd part from the plugin and to host it on any other server/CDN where i/other can request to generate thumbnail without any charges.
I tried free webhosting provider. but i felt they are generally slow/down maximum of time.
Please suggest the approach or CDN, if any...
Or any online image api which can resize/zoom/crop/edit an image, if i pass the image url.
It will be very hard (almost impossible) to find a reliable server/CDN that will generate thumbnails of images for free.
TANSTAAFL
Assuming your plugin uses several standard wordpress function, you might be able to use another plugin which takes the generated thumbnails and uploads them to another server. I recommend W3 Total Cache.
You could also try CoralCDN to take some load off your server.
So: You can use CoralCDN (or similar) and just point the URLs of your thumbnails through it, or you can have a caching plugin like W3TC upload the files to an almost-free site like Amazon S3.

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