I think I got more answers to this curiosity question than some of my technical ones! Thank you all very much for your answers. I appreciate the willingness of list members to share, and I love it when there is a question even I can answer.
Thanks again! -Courtney
-----Original Message----- From: wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Neil Harris Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 2:54 PM To: Wikimedia developers Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Where can I find old discussions on mediawikiprogramming choices?
Christensen, Courtney wrote:
Hi,
I know how to check the archives, but I'm not sure if this would even
be
there. What I am really curious about is why it was decided to go
with
using ImageMagick to resize images, rather than just changing the
width
attribute of the image?
Thanks, -Courtney
If I recall correctly, two reasons:
* resizing the image at the server side makes for a much smaller image file, reducing bandwidth costs and server load, and decreasing page load
times proportionately (consider, for example, a 1000x1000 image reduced to a 200 x 200 thumbnail, which will load 25x faster than the original at the same compression ratio)
* most browsers do a very poor job of resizing images, generally using simple pixel selection, and ImageMagick can do a much better job
-- Neil
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