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Stephen Bain wrote: | John R. Owens wrote: | |>I don't know if this might have ever been suggested before already, but |>perhaps a change in software could allow us to set a maximum image size |>in our user preferences? Either in width/height, e.g. "always shrink |>images to less than 200 pixels wide or 150 pixels high, whichever is |>smaller", or in kB, e.g. "always shrink images to less than 10 kB". | | Unfortunately I don't think this would be a workable solution, unless | a thumbnail duplicate of every image was created at the time of | uploading. That would be fairly straightforward to do, although it | would be very resource intensive on the image server(s). (Is there | more than one yet?) To shrink each image after every request before | sending to the browser would literally kill the servers. | | A better way would be to allow for a user preference to have images | either on or off by default, but have a link on the page to view a | version with images. So if a user browsing with images off wanted to | see an image, they could then re-load the page with images included. | (If it's good enough for Outlook, then it's good enough for | Wikipedia.)
That's why I was suggesting it would probably be desirable to have a limited number of options for maximum width/height/filesize. If that were the case, then a limited number of different sized copies could be cached, the same way, if I understand correctly, that the thumbnail images are cached after the first time they're viewd in the page. So, for instance, you might have four width/height category choices, e.g. 100x75, 200x150, 400x300, and 600x400, and then you "just" need disk space for four or less copies of each image (obviously, any images that are, say, 250x200 would only need two extra copies, and those rather small ones). I suppose that since this would be applied to pretty much all images, instead of only those formatted to use thumbnails. So what you might end up with, for the hypothetical picture and choices given above (call the picture example.jpg), would be something like creating files corresponding to the following URLs (I haven't figured just which name hash directory it should actually belong in, especially since I notice it does take the "XXXpx-" part into account): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/ab/Example.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/cd/200px-Example.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/ef/100px-Example.jpg and perhaps something like http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/12/5kb-Example.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/34/10kb-Example.jpg
And then, if you've set your preferences accordingly, you get the 200px or 100px version, and if not, you get Example.jpg itself in the viewed page (assuming it hasn't been thumbnailed, either). If this were to be done, I'd expect there should be a script to create these thumbnails, run at a low priority, before the option were enabled, so that the servers wouldn't bog down if many people using the option started browsing image-laden pages. But I'd definitely want to see what kind of demands it would make on disk space first.
And mind me, I'm not really pushing for the idea myself, just trying to present an optimal solution to a problem that was brought up. I'm on broadband, so it doesn't affect me much personally. I just thought I'd throw the idea out there.
- -- John R. Owens ProofReading Markup Language : http://prml.sourceforge.net/