Image cropping at presentation layer/front-end - image

Our site creates various crops/sizes (of an image) UPON image upload.
We want to move away from this approach, as our presentation layer/front-end morphs over time, and subsequently, the image presentation size requirements change.
What's the best, most long-term sustainable approach to do this? Guidance appreciated.
We're working with: HTML, CSS, JQuery, PHP/mySQL and Drupal.

The best approach would be to continue generating the thumbnails as you do currently but keep the original uploaded as is. Later down the time, lets say the image requirements change, it would be easier to run a script and re-generate all the images. This way we make sure that we are not doing image croping at runtime, because this can be time consuming and resource intensive.
Let me know if this helps.
Thanks

Related

Website loads image with 1-2 second delay. Could I increase the performance somehow?

recently I made a website for my photography. htttp://www.simotamas.com
I am a newbie, so its not the best site but it works fine for me, I got only one problem, when a site is loaded on a device for the first time, the gallery loading time takes up to 1-2 seconds.
Could you guys please check if I mess up something with the code?
Or should I made the pictures even smaller?
Any way I could increase the loading performance.
I would be really thankful for any advice.
Some points you can consider
Use thumbnails for preview (low resolution) , while clicking load actual image.
Load images of only visible part first then load the images in bottom. (May affect user experience)
if you have cpu power , use any libraries like cache tools or compression tools like
https://nielse63.github.io/php-image-cache/ . benchmark it carefully.
use gzip if you are not using gzip compression for your server.
The fact your website doesn't wait for the image to load is considered a plus (look into asynchronous web page content loading for a good read) that said you should compress your images before uploading them.. tinypng.com is a nice tool for it... But if it's a photography website doing so would reduce picture quality... Try to play with Photoshop save settings to find your ideal compromise between quality and size with respect to "memory" size... Pictures are heavy.. high definition and resolution will obviously result in heavier files to download
Update: another thing you could do is actually display (smaller) thumbnail and only load the full picture on request. I.e: user clicks and image opens in new tab
It would help if you create smaller thumb versions of your images so the browser can initially load these ones for the overview and no need for scaling way to big images down while rendering the page. An image should always be downloaded in the dimension it's going to be presented.

How do I make above-the-fold content load first on my website? (control the load order)

My website for architectural visualization: http://www.greenshell3d.com
I noticed on the networking tab / incognito it takes 15 seconds or so to load the above-the-fold content. (most notably the image slideshow.)
Some of the images in the slideshow load at the very end instead of the beginning of the website load process. Now I understand the browser handles this order, but perhaps there is another way. As it stands, the bounce-rate is too high and I expect it is because of load time.
I've seen a jquery snippet on github that allows one to control the order of image loads - do you think this is a good option? I'd be glad to hear any opinions before investing the time to fix this.
Any ideas? Thanks!
You said you are interested in any opinions as well, so first some general thoughts: There is no page fold. The web that we produce content for exists in so many different screen sizes + resolutions that it’s impossible to say "The fold is below this big image!". Yes, Google changed the pagespeed insights tool to make people load stuff on top of the page first, but I think their wording there is really bad.
Now to your image loading issue:
The first thing I would recommend is to reduce the size of all the images. They seem to be around 280 - 300 kb per image and you have a few of them. Since there is a translucent overlay over them anyways you can probably get away with reducing the image quality without people noticing it (because they don’t see the image directly). Play around with the values here.
I would then look into optimizing the code for the slider to load the first image first, then the rest of the page and the other images asynchronously maybe after that. Another trick could be to increase the slide fade time from the first slide to other slides so the slider doesn’t change if the next image isn’t ready yet. You said you found a jQuery script to implement that, that’s where I’d start.
As a general guideline: the position of requests in the source code usually determines the load order of things on the page. If your images are requested by JavaScript at the end of the page, that lead to the images being loaded later than you want them to be loaded.

Best way to deal with image thumbnails on news web site (custom CMS based on codeigniter)?

I’ve been thinking a while about the best solution and as much as I read I get more and more confused. There are a lot of different libraries and helpers (most of them are outdated or for CI 1.x) and I really need your help.
I have a custom CMS based on CodeIgniter 2.1.3, news site that has about 40-50 images on the home page, but 80% of them are really small thumbnails in 3 different sizes and the other 20% of the images on the home page are in 2 sizes + for the inner pages when I list the news from a category there is 1 size of thumbnails. So in total I will need the original image for the news story, + 5-6 thumbnails sizes for the home page.
What’s the smartest way to deal with this? There will be let’s say 10-50 new news per day.
Is it still better to create 5-6 thumbnails per image during the upload?
What about the method “on the fly”? I’m more into this method, as I read, only the first visitor will call the library/helper to generate the thumbnails, and for the others the thumbnails will be already created so it won’t waste CPU. What about this method? Is it good practice?
What caching techniques I should use for these what I need?
Also I forgot to ask, how the other CMS system deal with generating the thumbnails? I mean about Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.
Do they store predefined sizes or generate them on the fly?
I guess their logic should be the best, or maybe not, but I want to implement something smart in my CodeIgniter CMS.
I didn’t mention, but I think it’s not important to this, I use Grocery CRUD for the admin panel.
Any help is appreciated.
Your best bet is to create images on the fly + use CDN like Amazon Cloudfront to cache the resized versions of your source image.
I’ve been using CodeIgniter for a number of years to build websites where lots of different sizes of images are used throughout the website. At the beginning I used to create every size needed out of the original image during the upload process (could easily end up with more than 5 thumbnails). This proved to be delivering the best performance – whenever you need an image of the certain size you just include it with no additional PHP processing. However I noticed that I end up with a huge number of images on the server, where the older ones may not even be used that often (e.g.: articles older than a year). Plus developing this way takes longer.
Then I started creating images on the fly, firstly using 3rd party libraries and later developed my own interface for CodeIgniter. This saves a lot of time, because during the upload process you save an original version of the image not worrying about resized versions. When displaying an image in the front end, all you normally need to do is to pass certain dimensions of the image required. Doing this way, not only you can get 5-6 versions of the image, but as many as you need. Also that’s a solution for the future when you redesign your website where the different sized images might be needed! What would you do when none of your 5 thumbnail options are no longer valid and you need different sizes?
You’re right, resizing an image on the fly can really be CPU consuming operation (especially when the large images are involved), therefore caching is a must. You can cache images right on your server or get CDN on top of that.
To keep the server tidy I normally run a cron job to delete on-the-fly images older than let's say a week. That saves space + doesn't cause harm - whenever image is needed to display, it'll just get recreated.
Check out timthumb, it's a script that resizes images on the fly and stores them in a cache. It's a simple as including an image tag with parameters in the URL.
ALso check this link which looks promising http://www.jenssegers.be/blog/31/Codeigniter-resizing-and-cropping-images-on-the-fly-continued
I love the way Drupal manage this. In Drupal 6 there was a module called imagecache (now is in core in Drupal 7, but functionality is very similar), which basically stores presets for images (image sizes, transformations, effects...) and when the visitor ask for an image the module generate different images based on presets and serve this images. This way you upload an image but have different images for different purposes.
The module has a really useful feature, if you want to change one preset, you can "flush" all the images related with that preset, so the visitors can see the changes.
Of course there are many other modules in Drupal related to imagecache or image styles, that add other effects like watermarks...
More information:
http://drupal.org/node/949222
http://drupal.org/node/163561

product images with no loss of quality (or pixel perfect, with no processing/resizing done at all)?

I have spent a lot of time on my product images, adjusting them to perfectly match the actual product's color.. white balance, tint, contrast, hue.. But now when I look at them in Magento, they have been butchered beyond belief. For my products, it is mandatory that the images appear precisely as do the products. I have plenty of bandwidth and am not concerned with minimizing file size. I also do not mind if I have to manually resize and upload the same image two or three times if I can somehow bypass the processing that is happening altogether.
Magento is great! But this is a showstopper. I cannot launch the website if the images do not look right. If I can't do this, I'm actually going to have to ditch this cart which I've spent months learning, or spend a lot of time coming up with my own solution even though I have no low-level mysql experience. Either way, delaying launch would really hurt financially.
I have attempted to insert ->setQuality(99), after the call to init() and before the call to resize(), in \catalog\product\view\media.phtml, and also after the call to init() in \catalog\product\gallery.phtml.
in both cases I have also used setQuality(10) to ensure that I have done it properly, and strangely it works in gallery.phtml but not in media.phtml. It doesn't matter though, because even though the 100 value in gallery.phtml is not too bad in terms of detail, unfortunately contrast/color/exposure is different. It looks washed out and desaturated. It makes the product look unappealing.
In a thread at magentocommerce.com, someone suggested that it is the resize() function that is causing the problem, but that can't be true because resize() is not called within gallery.phtml. In general people have pointed to GD2.php as the culprit, but I haven't found any solutions that get around it completely.
If I were to upload a 265 px width image for the media.phtml view, and a separate one of the same photo using whatever resolution I desire for the blown-up gallery.phtml view, how would I tag those in the backend (base or small? or will I need more tags?) and then how would I access the proper image from the phtml files? This is a bit over my head. I think I can figure it out but not without spending a lot of time, which I do not have. Is there an extension that exists that already has tackled this problem? I notice that some of the "lightbox" extensions are popular, but none of their descriptions mention anything about overcoming the horrendous image quality spit out by gd2, which makes me doubt that they do.
Can someone please offer some advice? If there is already an extension, I would be so pleased. Thank you.
It seems the best solution is to switch from Magento's default Gd2 library to ImageMagick for more control and better resolution. The Magento forums have a post with the details here. You need to make sure that your edits are performed in an upgrade-safe manner.

Image size guidelines

This may well be a little of an open-ended question
The site I am working on requires to be optimised for performance. One of the key areas is to optimise the file sizes of the images used upon the site.
Unfortunatley these images are being created by employees who do not have the required knowledge for creating images for the web, and it is my job to produce a set of guidelines for them to use.
I was wondering whether there was any resource/guidlines/literature regarding typical images file sizes for images of different dimensions - as I would like to include something like this to aid them to ensure their images are being created properly.
Any info would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
I can't answer the opinion question, but I can suggest some guidelines that will keep your images smaller.
First off, if they're using Photoshop to edit their images, it's likely they're storing a whole bunch of crap in the headers (digital papertrail, EXIF data, and such). Also, folks will frequently save in too high a bit depth.
For novice users, trying to explain why they need to use "save for web" is more likely to confuse them. Instead, just point them at:
http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/
This site is rather handy - it will compress all the images on a page you specify, or you can upload the images.
You should strongly consider writing some guidelines about where images are stored as well. It's frequently very beneficial to have your static image content stored on several servers, apart from your dynamic content. Most browsers will only download a limited # of files at a time from any given website (usually it's 2).
Unless there's a good reason, all your images should be cached using one of the HTTP cache techniques (expires, etags, etc).
Good luck.
72 dpi as a resolution and either jpeg or png formats work best.
Try to use images at the exact pixel area size they will end up being displayed as. This is specified by the images height and width attributes.
You can set the output quality of a jpeg image which will also save file size although there is a trade off against image quality.
I hope this is of use.

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