Photo compression plugin

[ItsAllGoneToTheDogs]

raywjohnson we def appreciate the behind the scenes work, you guys are the unsung heroes of life (seriously, no one complains when they press a button and it works)

[raywjohnson]

The current limit is 16GB (no limits on width X height dimension). So that should work for most phones. Once a day, these large images will be auto resized to 800 x 600. The optimal is 800 x 600 (or close to that). The widest an image can display on a post is about 680 wide.

[Dewesq55]

raywjohnson - What is an optional (or at least reasonable?) size for uploaded images to the site?

[raywjohnson]

I wanted to add more to this idea. Most do not understand there are many limiting factors.

By example.

Let's say I up the sizes allowed (max upload = 1GB, max post = 16GB, max uploads per post = 16, max size allowed in vB = 1GB). So now you can upload 16, 1GB images on a single post.

One post, with 16 x 1GB image attachments, from a slow connection, will lock the server up (possible crash it) as 100% of all the server RAM is now used up for the time it takes for the upload to complete. And the processors are all busy uploading (and, if implemented, resizing) the images. Note, I am overstating this on purpose. The server could probably handle this, but what if (what if?) 5 people upload a bunch of 1GB images at the same time (or very near the same time)?

The limits are in place to make it less likely to have this problem. This is the trade off.

Having the server handle the resizing of posted images is easy for the members, but harder on the servers resources. I have to find a good balance. Having images resized before upload is a better solution all around.

However, I am about to upgrade the server. It will have more resources and I am switching the web server software to NGINX. Which is supposed to be much better at managing static resources (like file uploads). So, we shall see what I can do.

[raywjohnson]

There is a misconception here. Wordpress does resize, but not the way you think. It is actually worse. What Wordpress does is upload the large image, then make a bunch for resized smaller copies. So instead of one image, you get 5 or more images, all different sizes. The server upload and post size limits are still in effect.

[mgaretz]

I resize all images to 600 pixels wide and 72 dpi before posting.

[ItsAllGoneToTheDogs]

I helped run a vbulletin forum before I understand that, I just misunderstood what the site upgrade was and thought there might be new options from our end. There are programs that allow any upload but resize it AND compress it before it hits the server, but I was only looking at wordpress. You said already in the previous topic that none of the options for that sort of thing for vbulletin are worthwhile. So my post is redundant.

[raywjohnson]

I upped the max file size limit on images to 16MB.

But...

I forgot to mention that there are server limits as well.

The max # of files per upload is 10. So only 10 attachments per post. If you have more images to upload, just post again.

The max SIZE of the entire post + upload (including attachments) is 256MB (greater than 10x16MB, so all good).

The max SIZE per uploaded image is 32MB (to ensure each image can upload).

I would stress that using an app to auto resize before upload is the best solution.

[raywjohnson]

I will reiterate the problem to help clarify. It is not compression that is the main factor. It is the size. Compression does factor in, but you can cut the file size to 1/4th, by shrinking the image to half the size, you can cut the file size done some percentage with more compression. Most images are already compressed (jpg), so compressing them more has little benefit.

By example. Note: these are averages as the true size is dependent on all factors (PPI, resolution, size, compression, etc).

An 8 mega pixel image, displayed at 300ppi (pixels per inch) and is about the size of a normal 8x11 sheet of paper and (on average) is 8mb.

Ok that is not too bad. But here are the real issues.

Space: If you get 1000 new images per month, you store 8gb new images per month. If your storage is 80gb, 10 months and you are out of space. Adding more space to the server cost more (per month).

Size: Even a small 8 mega pixel image will almost fill the screen of a 21 inch monitor. The images can only show 800px width on the forum due to the formatted size. And on any hand held device, 300 to 400 pixels wide. Important to note that when a website resizes an image for display, the actual image is not resized, it is just made to look smaller on the screen. A 8mb image that "looks" 300 pixels wide is still 8mb (and the server has to send it and the browser has to download it to display on a tiny screen, still 8mb).

More mega pixels: This issue gets worse every year as the cameras on phones are getting higher than 40 mega pixels. I assume that trend will continue.

The solution is to just make the images smaller. I have an automated system that scans for images larger than 800px wide and reduces the size to 800px wide. When I first ran it, the size reduction for all attachment images on the disk was from 150GB to 25GB (1/6 the space, no effect on display).

So, what are the solutions.

First, I will look at allowing uploads of larger images as they will only stay large on the server for 24 hours at most.

Another (better) solution is to search your app store for a photo resizer for upload. I searched both apple and google, many to choose from.

[Dewesq55]

ItsAllGoneToTheDogs - There's an Android app called Photo Resizer that works really well for reducing size to post on websites and forums

[ItsAllGoneToTheDogs]

My cannon camera shoots in raw. My cell phone (S21 Ultra) is set to take jpeg, I don't care about .raw on a cellphone, but the smallest jpeg picture size I'm willing to use on it is too big for AR.

[ItsAllGoneToTheDogs]

I thought wordpress had forum software, if I was mistaken and we're still on vbulletin then I guess disregard the request since we already had that conversation

[rickgregory]

What kind of phone? There are various apps that will convert RAW to JPEG etc. Compression isn't an issue there, format is

[jfmorris]

ItsAllGoneToTheDogs The Pitmaster Club forums are run on commercial software called vBulletin, designed for doing forums. Wordpress isn't really built for this type of discussion site, and is only used for the public facing site.

[ItsAllGoneToTheDogs]

My phone does take .raw shots but I won't be using it for that, if there's something I want to shoot that well I get the good camera and use my photo editing software. My phone does however shoot like 100+mp jpegs and while I can turn that off and take lower quality shots, even those are too large for AR. When we previously discussed this, the consensus was no reliable compression tool on vbulletin, but now we are on wordpress so figured I'd bring it up again