When exposing original-size or otherwise huge file versions *for download* when they're not intended to be viewed in browser, it may be wise to use the 'Content-Disposition' HTTP header, as we do for XML output from Special:Export.
This should force most browsers to show a download dialog instead of loading the giant file inline; you can then take your mega-image and stick it in Photoshop or Gimp or whatever if you really wanted it (such programs are optimized to work with huge files, while browsers are most emphatically *not*).
Of course this may mean we need to either filter the file through PHP to add headers (scary!) or have a second "downloadable" URL where the swift or caching infrastructure adds the headers.
-- brion
On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 11:41 AM, Keegan Peterzell kpeterzell@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 9:02 AM, Jean-Frédéric <jeanfrederic.wiki@gmail.com
wrote:
This is not a new issue, as this is the same functionality we have
provided for years on the File: page. But Media Viewer makes it a lot easier for users to accidentally load a huge file. So I think we should seriously consider providing a warning, if it is easy to implement and if we can identify a threshold that is based on data and that is acceptable to our communities.
See [[bugzilla:29967]], “ Better support for viewing and downloading large files” https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29967
-- Jean-Fred
Ah, great, thanks for the link, Jean-Fred. In the back of my mind I thought I'd seen something about this on Bugzilla.
As I pointed out in a meeting an on-wiki and this bug confirms, this is a problem that exists for viewing large files in general, not just Media Viewer, so I'd like to make sure that the solution is practical for the file page as well and not just put together because there was a problem with Media Viewer. The bug is a big enough issue outside of Media Viewer that it deserves the attention.
-- Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Product Wikimedia Foundation
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