Thumbnails in IP4.0 Abysmal

[munkiman]

testing

this board is obviously set to use GD.

On my beta board, it's using image magick http://truradio.org/index.php?/topic/2-testing-in-the-test-forum/&_fromLogin=1. You can see the color shift.

[Lindy]

Relax, we've not said no to this -- give us time.  

 

[JLS]

Fair to say that I'm pretty lost in the conversation. But I think this is all discussing a debate about how the core functionality should work. Then there is a mention of hooks being an option in the long run either way.

 

i just want to point out that one huge issue with hooks for something many feel should be core functionality is our mobile apps. Since IP refuses to offer a mobile app (white label) many of us use Tapa or other apps since our members demand an app. Hooks etc end up being ignored by those apps and companies because they aren't part of the official IP. Makes for a poor experience when the products don't work in harmony together. So hopefully, no un-official hooks etc end up neccisary.

[Tarun]

testing

this board is obviously set to use GD.

On my beta board, it's using image magick http://truradio.org/index.php?/topic/2-testing-in-the-test-forum/&_fromLogin=1. You can see the color shift.

​Hey, Guild Wars 2 WvW! A fellow GW2 player?

[Flitterkill]

i just want to point out that one huge issue with hooks for something many feel should be core functionality is our mobile apps. Since IP refuses to offer a mobile app (white label) many of us use Tapa or other apps since our members demand an app. Hooks etc end up being ignored by those apps and companies because they aren't part of the official IP. Makes for a poor experience when the products don't work in harmony together. So hopefully, no un-official hooks etc end up neccisary.​

Not ignoring your point but in case you missed this take your browser and squeeze the width as much as you can. By default the skin is responsive and you can see the built in mobile view.  Or view this site on your smartphone. Provided whatever skin provider you use supports responsive for 4.0 just sticking a bookmark icon on your phone may cut it.

[munkiman]

​Hey, Guild Wars 2 WvW! A fellow GW2 player?

​Yup, I run the northern shiverpeaks community using IPB

[Angeels]

​Yup, I run the northern shiverpeaks community using IPB

 

​Piken Square Community here!

[munkiman]

​Piken Square Community here!

​Very cool. Good to see fellow server community leaders

[Soniceffect]

I agree with others regarding the automatic resizing and compression of images when they are uploaded. The main problem that I have (and I believe many others will also) is that the users on my forum are not nessesarily technical people. Therefore with the bringing out of higher and higher resolution images just from phones alone it simply means many users cant upload pictures as they just dont know how to resize them on the computer before trying to upload them. Therefore I want to be able to unrestrict the file size that is allowable on my forum without adding an unbelievably hugh amount of bandwidth. The only way I can see to do this would be for it to rescale and compress images to a compression ratio and maximum scale that I set within the admin CP.

This is something I believe would be extremely powerful as a setting and we know you guys can do it because your geniouses As Lindy already pointed out they didnt say no to it

[JLS]

Not ignoring your point but in case you missed this take your browser and squeeze the width as much as you can. By default the skin is responsive and you can see the built in mobile view.  Or view this site on your smartphone. Provided whatever skin provider you use supports responsive for 4.0 just sticking a bookmark icon on your phone may cut it.

​I appreciate the comment and I won't explain too much so I don't derail the thread but in my experience it just doesn't cut it. Our users want/demand an app and there is many other benefits to utilizing one as well.

[slimf]

I cannot believe that there is no thumbnail image processing... This topic shouldn't be up for discussion!

What IPB are saying is if someone uploads 10x 2meg image files, the board can **display** them 150x150 (or whatever setting has been chosen by admin), but the poor end user needs to download 20 meg of data to get that view. The server has to serve it and the board administrator has to pay for it. Mobile users may as well give up, because they will be paying for it to. This is a HUGE mistake by you guys that needs fixing.

Images should be able to be uploaded by OP  in what ever size they like (with a max meg setting set by admins if required)

Images should then be processed - a thumbnail image should be created to whatever size has been set by admin.

Optionally the original image should be resized down to dimensions set by the admin - So when end users view the 'large' version its either the original image or a smaller version if set by the admin.

 

So for a real life example:

OP uploads a 100 megapixel image taken with a D1000000 camera and its 85meg.

The system accepts the upload, but then scales it down to 1500x1500 for storage

A thumbnail is also created and stored at 150x 150 and is used for thumbnails.

When an end user views the page, the 150x150 image is loaded by the browser.

When the end user clicks the thumbnail the 1500 x 1500 image is loaded by the browser.

The admin is happy because he hasn't served an 85 meg image, and the end user is happy because they can see a decent size version when required and the original poster is happy because he was able to upload his image without resizing it first.

 

 

 

 

[prupdated]

Generally images displayed on a page should match their served size. HTML scaling is not generally appropriate. Most page speed ranking services will also tell you this.

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/image-optimization#delivering-scaled-image-assets

They will even take it a step further and go into sprite use depending on your sites use of images.

As it is, for years I have had to work around this in IPB by manually editing various templates, system files and settings to pull my images from a caching resize script.

These are some of the optimization techniques I would rather see implemented in IPB. 

The example on page 1 of this thread is simply HTML scaled and is the same as the full size image. Instead of using 150KB it should probably use 50KB. If you have 10 images like this, now you're up to 1 MB of unnecessary extra transfer for the page.

[Makoto]

I think serving a single sensible sized preview image that should fit most modern screen resolutions is the best choice. This can still, obviously, scale with the responsive template when needed, but embedded images really don't need to take up 100% of the posts width most of the time. I guess you could call that personal preference, but I think that's wasteful and takes up way too much screen space, especially on threads (or forums in general) that are centered around image sharing.

Having multiple preview images that scale with the responsive template could also be nice, but it would probably be really difficult to implement. I think you'd have to use Javascript for this, and that's really an even worse solution that's not worth considering. You might also just try and detect mobile devices server side and return smaller scaled images for them, but you won't know the actual resolution of the mobile device in use. This could still help mobile users though, serving a smaller sized preview still saves bandwidth, which is important on mobile networks. (But honestly mobile screen resolutions are so huge now I don't know how relevant this is anymore, they may take full advantage of the desktop sized preview images).

Nonetheless, preview images are definitely needed. The full/raw image should not always be dumped into the post and just scaled by the browser. Aside from all the wasted bandwidth, browser scaling isn't great in itself, and forcing the client to scale large images on the fly wastes a non-negligible amount of processing power which can noticeably slow down page rendering speeds.

Anyways, Lindy has made a response now, so hopefully we can expect something here to be changed.

[Soniceffect]

I cannot believe that there is no thumbnail image processing... This topic shouldn't be up for discussion!

What IPB are saying is if someone uploads 10x 2meg image files, the board can **display** them 150x150 (or whatever setting has been chosen by admin),

​This is incorrect. Thumbnails are produced.

[SJ77]

​This is incorrect. Thumbnails are produced.

​no, no they are not.  

[SJ77]

I cannot believe that there is no thumbnail image processing... This topic shouldn't be up for discussion!

So for a real life example:

OP uploads a 100 megapixel image taken with a D1000000 camera and its 85meg.

The system accepts the upload, but then scales it down to 1500x1500 for storage

A thumbnail is also created and stored at 150x 150 and is used for thumbnails.

When an end user views the page, the 150x150 image is loaded by the browser.

When the end user clicks the thumbnail the 1500 x 1500 image is loaded by the browser.

The admin is happy because he hasn't served an 85 meg image, and the end user is happy because they can see a decent size version when required and the original poster is happy because he was able to upload his image without resizing it first.

​That's a hell of a first post my friend! You are on point. You understand exactly the needs of all involved, both suppliers and consumers of web content.

You clearly have a brilliant mind!

Serving HTML scaled thumbnails will degrade the user experience with huge load times, No image processing of thumbnails/full size images will make it costly to be the admin as bandwidth sky rockets and storage needs expand,  and it will destroy .. wait obliterate SEO, pagerank benchmarks and the rest of it.

Lets see, without fixing this issue IPB will be

• Expensive for admins to run image sites. storage & bandwidth nightmare
• Slow page loads, and poor user experience. (huge thumbnails  file size are massive burden)
• Lousy SEO scores due to bad practice HTML scaling and slow page loads
• Frustrating for users who wish to supply content - "Asked to resize my image before uploading? hell with it, I am not uploading anything"
• Layout issues, poor experience (full size images that don't even come close to fitting on a normal screen (or even a 4K monitor LOL) forget mobile

So to recap, Admins unhappy, users unhappy, content suppliers unhappy, and web ranking services unhappy. = FAIL

Your plan solves all of the above issues. I know the developers of IPB are also brilliant which is why I am completely baffled at how they missed the mark so badly in this area. I would hate to see such an amazing suite such as IPB4 which does so many things perfectly suffer due to simple image processing issues that were already solved circa 2007.  Let's hope they listen to our plea. You have an amazing plan that would not only prevent IPB from being a step backward but it would make IPB the clear leader!

Thanks for a wonderful first post!

[Soniceffect]

​no, no they are not.  

​OK, no probs

[SJ77]

Hi Marc,

nice FTP screenshot but,

Is that IPB4?

Is that an image you posted to a thread?

.. please elaborate.

[Tarun]

​Yup, I run the northern shiverpeaks community using IPB

​

​Piken Square Community here!

​Dragonbrand here. Our community used to be an IP.Board too.

Perhaps we should make a new tpic for us GW2 players so not to derail this one.

[Makoto]

@superj707 

(Testing a large scanned image below to test how this behaves)

Hidden Content

Edit: Welp it's just displaying the scaled image as the preview and full sized image.

So it's generating a good sized preview (here), but it's not displaying the full scale image (here) when viewing the image in the lightbox. This is either a bug or I'm still severely confused as to how this system is intended to work, I think this has to be a bug though.​

See the links. ​Previews are generated here currently. The previews are displayed in the thread and as the lightox image. The raw image is not displayed anywhere publicly. I assumed this was a bug. We have people in this thread arguing about how the software is intended to work and I don't think anyone here other than IPS staff really understands whether this is a bug or if any of this is actually intended functionality right now.

[Soniceffect]

Hi Marc,

nice FTP screenshot but,

Is that IPB4?

Is that an image you posted to a thread?

.. please elaborate.

​Yes its an FTP screenshot of the thumbnail created from an attachment to a post in IPS4.

Elaborate? Yes, of course. See the screenshot below. Pointing at the image you get the location it is pointing to which is the full image

 

Inspect however the image on the page (mine are intentionally that big btw) you see it points to the thumbnail image

 

 

I answered in such a manor as I was completely dismissed by yourself without even so much as asking what made me think they are already there or anything. It was a simple "No, no they are not" which I found quite condescending.

The issue people are having isnt that there are no thumbnails, its that they cannot set the max size of an image and have IPS resize the image and compress before it is saved. The full image, not the thumbnail. The thumbnail image resizing and compression already exists.

 

[SJ77]

test

[SJ77]

Hi, Marc

okay, I am seeing a thumbnail now, albeit not a very useful one.  Barely saved any bandwidth at all. A GIANT image isn't much of a thumbnail. Thumbnails that are nearly full size really miss the purpose of having a thumbnail in the first place. (which is to offer a small version preview for bandwidth saving purposes and quick page loads)  I can assure you that when this thread started thumbnails weren't being generated and all resizing was happening with HTML scaling (as well documented by others here in this thread) so something must have changed.

I didn't mean to sound dismissive or condescending, it's just that I was posting from my phone while out for breakfast and didn't have much time for a proper reply. Perhaps I should have reserved my comments for a time when I could afford a bit more politeness. My apologies.

[SJ77]

strangely enough the full size of my water-lily test above is leading to the same image as the thumbnail. .. 

This is getting Crazy!

[Soniceffect]

strangely enough the full size of my water-lily test above is leading to the same image as the thumbnail. .. 

This is getting Crazy!

​the confusion here is that the thumbnail size is simply set high on this forum. My screenshot about was from one of the previews before even beta as didn't have access to any other from work. I will do some decent explaination when i get home and hopefully clear some bits up for people.