2009/8/2 Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net:
It seems to me that delivering *static* thumbnails of GIF images, either in GIF or PNG format, would be a considerable improvement over the current situation. And indeed, the code to do that seems to be already in place: just set $wgMaxAnimatedGifArea = 0; So, my questions would be:
- Is there a reason we don't do this already?
Careful to only do it if in fact definitely scaling. Animated GIFs are in use on lots of page on en:wp, for instance, when there's reason to put a small animation right there on the page rather than a click away.
- Alternatively, if the problem is ImageMagick taking too much time to
read animated GIFs even just to extract only the first frame, would some other scaling program be better? Indeed, it should even be possible to write a bit of PHP code to pull out just the first frame of a GIF file and hand it off to ImageMagick for scaling.
ImageMagick is a Swiss army knife - it does everything and isn't the best at anything. I would be unsurprised if there was a tool to do this specific job much better.
- d.