I am receiving control of a website and I need to take care of an image compression process.
Right now, when uploading an image, it gets stored on the server with high quality and when the website's being cached, the image is getting compressed for the cache. So the cache has a compressed copy of the image while the original, high quality image, is still stored on the server.
The tool which is responsible of doing what I have just described was developed by the current owner of the website and since I am not getting that tool I will need another one. The site is currently using Pydio and I have not seen any compression option there.
Since it seems I need a new tool for the image compression process, I want to know first what is the best practice, performance-wise, for handling the compression and I know there some good, experienced developers here.
I thought about some options:
Keep it the way it is now, which is to store the original image on the server and when caching, compress it for the cache (Best compatibility with the website since this is what the tool currently being used doing).
Compress all images the moment they are being uploaded and so I will have only the compressed images on the server and use them to cache (Save storage space, but don't know how to combine it with Pydio).
Have a cron which will compress all the images which are not already compressed (Gives me the ability to upload images freely without worrying about compressing them, though the images will not be immediately compressed).
Upload the image to a website which compresses the image and then take the outputted image and upload it (Really, sounds stupid and a lot of messing around in order to upload an image)..
What do you think will be the best practice, and why? Also, Is there a better practice for compressing the images?
Plus, if you know any tool which has an API for it or anything, I will be thankful to hear about it.
The website is built using PHP.
Since the question you're asking is a general-approach one, I will put my two-cents in.
On your approaches:
Option 4 - You could use some offline software or an external site for compression, but it seems tedious work. If I needed to upload one image per day, I would probably choose this option.
Option 2 - I would rather not do compression on upload since you lose the original image. Image compression can ruin some images very badly.
As for options 1&3 - I think it depends on the resources of your server, the number of images, the traffic of your site, etc. Generally, I prefer compressing/caching on request, not upload, but for a smaller site, it shouldn't make much difference.
As for the API - generally, you have two options: do the work on your server/site or use an external service.
When it comes to services, we use CloudImage, it has very simple API and it helps a lot with the compression process (and resizing if you need it). Also, you have the benefits of the CDN, which will boost the performance. Since you are using Pydio, I assume you need data security and privacy, so CloudImage may be a good option for you since they take the privacy stuff really seriously.
If you prefer to do this yourself, and given that you use PHP, I would recommend ImageMagick and the PHP library IMagick. You can control every parameter of the compression and the documentation is pretty good. The only downside is that to achieve best compression without losing quality, it is a bit of trial-and-error at first.
Good luck!
Send your image on Whatsapp to other, received Image will be compressed to the significance size
I've tried to find the answer for days from many sources, but unfortunately not reached any solution.
The problem is how to prevent user from accessing to software data (videos, images, etc.). For example, i have a software or mobil application. And it has some folders that contains videos. I don't want users not to access directly and copy them.
In addition, since these files are big, any conversion of the file needs much time. So this causes slow down the application. I think, encrypting the whole file takes a long time.
I'm asking my question independent of any environment. It can be a windows or android application. Is there any method or technic to achieve this?
Edit: If there is a way to decode/encode the files quickly, it can help me. Or such a password protection solution...
Sorry for my english.
Short version: Not really. All you can do is obfuscate the files, and (on mobile) you have limited resources with which to do this (cpu,ram)
No matter what you do to the files, your program must contain all the information required to decode them or they will not be usable. Ergo, the determined attacker will be able to get the files.
If all you are trying to do is keep out the casual person, then you probably don't need to do anything - extracting files from within mobile applications is generally beyond the normal user.
We have images stored in a file system in the following format. So that web applications can have access to those images with url (http://imageserver.domain.com/items/it1/small.jpg) through an http server.
Now, to allow graphics team to have access to those images for
adding/updating, I was thinking to setup an SVN rep for the folder
“items”. Is this considered a best practice? Any suggestions?
Its certainly doable, however I'd advise that you have 2 folders: one containing a "working set" of images to be used by your web app, and another to be accessed by your graphics team whenever necessary. That way, your team can have a stock of images to work with, while avoiding any possibilities of broken image links or other problems inside your web app.
Better to play it safe IMO.
Hope this helps!
I've always heard that it's considered 'good practice' to have only text under source control. With that said, I've seen companies certainly put images in their repository. Others have created round-abouts like having a virtual directory in IIS point to a shared file server. I prefer the latter since it doesn't take so long to bring down branches. On the reverse side, it provides no historical data that SC would--if needed, of course.
I was thinking to setup an SVN rep for the folder “items”. Is this considered a best practice?
It's an acceptable practice. The images are small and not all that likely to change.
Any suggestions?
Write a cheat sheet for your graphic artists so that they can check out and commit images without problems. The cheat sheets would be specific to the graphic tools they use and their access to Subversion.
I am looking for free web image management system/script/...
I was using and still use photobucket service, but my account is free and has limited space and bandwidth. Now I am approaching the limits. On another side I have web hosting account and want to use it for image hosting instead or in addition to my photobucket. Sounds good. I can use ftp to upload my images and I am fine with it. What I miss is photobucket's web interface to my images. I am talking about photo galleries or portfolio like or something. But basic list of thumbnails, so I can see my images and easy get link to specific image in different formats to past into forum posts or into other web pages referring to that specific picture. Besides, I need easy way to organize pictures in albums/subalbums (like in file system). I see gazillion of image gallery systems, but have hard time to find for what I need. Oh, and I do not want database, just flatfiles/directories.
Anything come to mind?
There's Coppermine Gallery.
I was just looking for something similar.
I know Coppermine pretty well (I run a site powered by it): it is very flexible, with tons of options, and relatively easy to mod to your needs if you know a bit of php. It also reads and displays EXIF data if you configure it to do so. There is a lively community of developers for Coppermine. There is also a plugin that displays BBcode (http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php/topic,74043.msg356623.html#msg356623), unfortunately only image by image (not in bulk like the ImageShack Uploader). The drawback is that Coppermine is a pretty bulky script and does not perform super fast, especially on slow servers.
Bravenet seems to be a service more than a script.
I'm also checking out Lightbox 2 (http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/lightbox2/#example) which seems nice and tiny, but not a chance of getting the EXIF file into the displayed image or getting the BBcode.
Will keep an eye on this thread
Back in the old days, Help was not trivial but possible: generate some funky .rtf file with special tags, run it through a compiler, and you got a WinHelp file (.hlp) that actually works really well.
Then, Microsoft decided that WinHelp was not hip and cool anymore and switched to CHM, up to the point they actually axed WinHelp from Vista.
Now, CHM maybe nice, but everyone that tried to open a .chm file on the Network will know the nice "Navigation to the webpage was canceled" screen that is caused by security restrictions.
While there are ways to make CHM work off the network, this is hardly a good choice, because when a user presses the Help Button he wants help and not have to make some funky settings.
Bottom Line: I find CHM absolutely unusable. But with WinHelp not being an option anymore either, I wonder what the alternatives are, especially when it comes to integrate with my Application (i.e. for WinHelp and CHM there are functions that allow you to directly jump to a topic)?
PDF has the disadvantage of requiring the Adobe Reader (or one of the more lightweight ones that not many people use). I could live with that seeing as this is kind of standard nowadays, but can you tell it reliably to jump to a given page/anchor?
HTML files seem to be the best choice, you then just have to deal with different browsers (CSS and stuff).
Edit: I am looking to create my own Help Files. As I am a fan of the "No Setup, Just Extract and Run" Philosophy, i had that problem many times in the past because many of my users will run it off the network, which causes exactly this problem.
So i am looking for a more robust and future-proof way to provide help to my users without having to code a different help system for each application i make.
CHM is a really nice format, but that Security Stuff makes it unusable, as a Help system is supposed to provide help to the user, not to generate even more problems.
HTML would be the next best choice, ONLY IF you would serve them from a public web server. If you tried to bundle it with your app, all the files (and images (and stylesheets (and ...) ) ) would make CHM look like a gift from gods.
That said, when actually bundled in the installation package, (instead of being served over the network), I found the CHM files to work nicely.
OTOH, another pitfall about CHM files: Even if you try to open a CHM file on a local disk, you may bump into the security block if you initially downloaded it from somewhere, because the file could be marked as "came from external source" when it was obtained.
I don't like the html option, and actually moved from plain HTML to CHM by compressing and indexing them. Even use them on a handful of non-Windows customers even.
It simply solved the constant little breakage of people putting it on the network (nesting depth limited, strange locking effects), antivirus that died in directories with 30000 html files, and 20 minutes decompression time while installing on an older system, browser safety zones and features, miscalculations of needed space in the installer etc.
And then I don't even include the people that start "correcting" them, 3rd party product with faulty "integration" attempts etc, complaints about slowliness (browser start-up)
We all had waited years for the problems to go away as OSes and hardware improved, but the problems kept recurring in a bedazzling number of varieties and enough was enough. We found chmlib, and decided we could forever use something based on this as escape with a simple external reader, if the OS provided ones stopped working and switched.
Meanwhile we also have an own compiler, so we are MS free future-proof. That doesn't mean we never will change (solutions with local web-servers seem favourite nowadays), but at least we have a choice.
Our software is both distributed locally to the clients and served from a network share. We opted for generating both a CHM file and a set of HTML files for serving from the network. Users starting the program locally use the CHM file, and users getting their program served from a network share has to use the HTML files.
We use Help and Manual and can thus easily produce both types of output from the same source project. The HTML files also contain searching capabilities and doesn't require a web server, so though it isn't an optimal solution, works fine.
So far all the single-file types for Windows seems broken in one way or another:
WinHelp - obsoleted
HtmlHelp (CHM) - obsoleted on Vista, doesn't work from network share, other than that works really nice
Microsoft Help 2 (HXS) - this seems to work right up until the point when it doesn't, corrupted indexes or similar, this is used by Visual Studio 2005 and above, as an example
If you don't want to use an installer and you don't want the user to perform any extra steps to allow CHM files over the network, why not fall back to WinHelp? Vista does not include WinHlp32.exe out of the box, but it is freely available as a download for both Vista and Server 2008.
It depends on how import the online documentation is to your product, a good documentation infrastructure can be complex to establish but once done it pays off. Here is how we do it -
Help source DITA compilant XML, stored in SCC (ClearCase).
Help editing XMetal
Help compilation, customized Open DITA Toolkit, with custom Perl/Java preprocessing
Help source cross references applications resources at compile time, .RC files etc
Help deliverables from single source, PDF, CHM, Eclipse Help, HTML.
Single source repository produces help for multiple products 10+ with thousands of shared topics.
From what you describe I would look at Eclipse Help, its not simple to integrate into .NET or MFC applications, you basically have to do the help mapping to resolve the request to a URL then fire the URL to Eclipse Help wrapper or a browser.
Is the question how to generate your own help files, or what is the best help file format?
Personally, I find CHM to be excellent. One of the first things I do when setting up a machine is to download the PHP Manual in CHM format (http://www.php.net/download-docs.php) and add a hotkey to it in Crimson Editor. So when I press F1 it loads the CHM and performs a search for the word my cursor is on (great for quick function reference).
If you are doing "just extract and run", you are going to run in security issues. This is especially true if you are users are running Vista (or later). is there a reason why you wanted to avoid packaging your applications inside an installer? Using an installer would alleviate the "external source" problem. You would be able to use .chm files without any problems.
We use InstallAware to create our install packages. It's not cheap, but is very good. If cost is your concern, WIX is open source and pretty robust. WIX does have a learning curve, but it's easy to work with.
PDF has the disadvantage of requiring the Adobe Reader
I use Foxit Reader on Windows at home and at work. A lot smaller and very quick to open. Very handy when you are wondering what exactly a80000326.pdf is and why it is clogging up your documents folder.
I think the solution we're going to end up going with for our application is hosting the help files ourselves. This gives us immediate access to the files and the ability to keep them up to date.
What I plan is to have the content loaded into a huge series of XML files, each one containing help for a specific item. This XML would contain links to other XML files. We would use XSLT to display the contents as necessary.
Depending on the licensing, we may build a client-specific XSLT file in order to tailor the look and feel to what they need. We may need to be able to only show help for particular versions of our product as well and that can be done by filtering out stuff in the XSLT.
I use a commercial package called AuthorIT that can generate a number of different formats, such as chm, html, pdf, word, windows help, xml, xhtml, and some others I have never heard of (does dita ring a bell?).
It is a content management system oriented towards the needs of technical documentation writers.
The advantage is that you can use and re-use the same content to build a set of guides, and then generate them in different formats.
So the bottom line relative to the question of choosing chm or html or whatever is that if you are using this you are not locked into a given format, but you can provide several among which the user can choose, and you can even add more formats as you go along, at no extra cost.
If you just have one guide to create it won't be worth your while, but if you have a documentation set to manage then it is the best to my knowledge. Their support is very helpful also.