Photography Heavy Sites: What settings / addons do you use?

[arn]

Hi,

What are people doing or using to manage large photo embeds? For us, storage size is not a problem. But image load time in photo-heavy threads is an issue. Note, we are not using resource manager. This is just for regular threads.

Previously we allowed unrestricted photo uploads. But that ended up resulting in 3-4MB embeds and people would just embed the large image. Our thumbnail size is 350px.

Now we limit it to 2000px on each side, which does recompress the images but now there are some concerns about quality issues.

Ideally, we'd embed a 2000px image, and link to the original. But it appears that's not an option with default xenforo.

Any tips?
arn

 

[Alpha1]

We use Cloudflare Polish (webp), Cloudflare Mirage & CF caching. Unfortunately there is no XF optimization addon for CloudFlare.
Lazy Loading of images.

 

[arn]

We use Cloudflare Polish (webp), Cloudflare Mirage & CF caching. Unfortunately there is no XF optimization addon for CloudFlare.
Lazy Loading of images.

What max image size do you set for forums? No limit?

arn

 

[Alpha1]

10MB.

 

[arn]

10MB.

Sorry. I meant resolution.

 

[Alpha1]

1600x1600px

 

[alternadiv]

When images are uploaded to XF, do they retain their data, or does it strip it? If the data is stripped, it would lower the image size. With a lower size, would the page load faster? Or does only resolution matter for page load?

 

[arn]

When images are uploaded to XF, do they retain their data, or does it strip it? If the data is stripped, it would lower the image size. With a lower size, would the page load faster? Or does only resolution matter for page load?

Depends on your settings. If you have high enough settings for resolution, it won't resize the image. Otherwise it does resize, it makes it smaller (filesize-wise too) and strips data (I think). And the file size is what makes a different in page load speed.

arn

 

[🔥Iggy🔥]

really, for any serious consideration at all, a compression mechanism needs to be employed....imho....

i dont think 1600px is gonna cut it going into the future...i have already got some complains and working on improving this atm over here...you can tell in particular for large or high rez screens that will basically ruin resized photos....again, imho lol...

its worse as the xen system, for some reason, actually will add padding size to resized images, so if you compare something you resize vs. xen resizing, the xen file will be larger....

i cant see my way to leaving things unlimited atm, but also, i dont think alot of people even want to be bothered resizing or compressing, its the lazy generation you know....needs to be direct and easy with phones, which, of course again, will suffer loading large file sizes if not compressed......to take this seriously you really need to compress and keep resolution high as possible the way im seeing things.......i didnt decide my exact path yet, but im trying to avoid letting xen do any of the work as a start.

perhaps it will be best to leave resolution open and compress by quality/filesize....no idea, need to do more tests....
otherwise, fwiw, we employ these basic mechanism like professionally tuned memcached/nginx/mariaDB blah blah..

 

[arn]

I think a reasonable embeddable size + keeping original is what I would want. We could approximate this by making Thumbnail size really big... but then it would attach weird. We just need two sizes of thumbnails. small thumbnail and medium thumbnail

Twitter just moved to that:

Twitter will now preserve JPEG quality for photo uploads on the web | TechCrunch

Twitter is changing the way it processes uploaded images, and the new way of doing things will be much-appreciated by any photographers sharing their work

techcrunch.com

Twitter will still be transcoding and compressing the thumbnails for the images, which is what you see in your Twitter feed. But once users click through, they will get the full, uncompressed (at least, not additionally compressed) image you originally uploaded, provided it’s a JPEG.

 

[🔥Iggy🔥]

I think a reasonable embeddable size + keeping original is what I would want. We could approximate this by making Thumbnail size really big... but then it would attach weird. We just need two sizes of thumbnails. small thumbnail and medium thumbnail

Twitter just moved to that:

Twitter will now preserve JPEG quality for photo uploads on the web | TechCrunch

Twitter is changing the way it processes uploaded images, and the new way of doing things will be much-appreciated by any photographers sharing their work

techcrunch.com

i heartily agree with this....in fact i think its literally one of the ONLY things vbulletin5 got right....giving options of image sizes to insert into text.....xenforo would do well to adopt this but i am not sure what the odds of that happening are... @Chris D ?
should be an option like click the image for full quality, 5000px etc etc, but embedded in the post could be a more practical filesized one for viewing....it also is useful for detail as a sort of zoom function to allow the original size, but not require it to be loaded for each page load...people want this....

i even came so far as to consider hacking a media gallery category to allow full rez...so there would be a high rez category ONLY as needed, but of course that is not a good solution at all sigh...would be nice to not have to fight it and make such complex custom solutions that is sure...

 

[webbouk]

I use this if it helps...

[TH] Image Optimizer [Deleted]

ThemeHouse submitted a new resource: [TH] Image Optimizer - Optimize your images and accelerate your forum with Image Optimizer provided by Kraken.io ... Read more about this resource...

xenforo.com

 

[Anatoliy]

Do we have control over thumbnail quality? My thumbnails look like... not very good. )

 

[Chromaniac]

xenforo out of the box only lets you pick dimensions of the thumbnail. along with what image library to be used to process images. nothing more.

 

[AndyB]

Do we have control over thumbnail quality? My thumbnails look like... not very good. )

What size thumbnails do you have set here? The default is 150.

 

[Anatoliy]

xenforo out of the box only lets you pick dimensions of the thumbnail. along with what image library to be used to process images. nothing more.

I see. Thanks.
Well, I use VPS, probably I should ask my hoster about it.

 

[Anatoliy]

What size thumbnails do you have set here? The default is 150.

View attachment 226852

150. but that's about size, not quality. )

 

[Chromaniac]

tbh, you host would not be able to help you out here. just set the dimension @AndyB posted above to higher. i have it set at 300. you can try different size and see what works for you. test on fresh uploads. once decided, set the size and then run the task to regenerate thumbnails for existing attachment.

about quality... i don't think there is any addon available which lets you customize the resizing settings used by xenforo. so testing with dimensions would be the way to go for now.

 

[Anatoliy]

tbh, you host would not be able to help you out here. just set the dimension @AndyB posted above to higher. i have it set at 300. you can try different size and see what works for you. test on fresh uploads. once decided, set the size and then run the task to regenerate thumbnails for existing attachment.

about quality... i don't think there is any addon available which lets you customize the resizing settings used by xenforo. so testing with dimensions would be the way to go for now.

yeah, I want to change it to 350. just wanted to find out about quality before rebuilding all the attachments.

 

[AndyB]

The quality will be slightly better in my opinion if you have Imagemagick PECL extension selected here: