Suggestion: auto-sizing of uploaded images

[Mr. X]

Re-sizing images for upload, for posts or avatars, can be tedious. Especially as modern digital cameras produce images that are far too large for this purpose by default. While I am used to doing this & have several tools to assist, it is still tedious. However, a couple of members have recently expressed frustration and difficulty getting images uploaded.

The forum software could automatically take care of re-sizing images on upload, before storing them. I have seen other websites that do this (even changing file formats). Seems like this might be a welcome enhancement for many contributors, saving both time & frustration and encouraging more graphical contribution (pretty pictures).

[SEDATE]

To re-size photos .. i use ''paint''
let say you take a photo 4MP ..Directly open it by paint.. then click on file-save as- (give a name)...it will saved like 512KB(AROUND) ..you just give a dif name and re-save to somewhere you wish..

just 2 cent info mate..

[Mr. X]

Yes, I often use Paint if just re-sizing or performing basic editing. Although I noticed people unfamiliar with it struggle (2 cases in the last week or so). But why are we all spending time doing this? The DeeperBlue computers could take care of it automatically for us. Of course, if you really like spending time with Paint - you could continue to handcraft your images

[trux]

Personally, I prefer resizing and modifying my images alone, than letting an automated program doing it for me in the way that may not fit my intention, or corrupting the quality. However, such automated resizing module indeed exists for vBulletin: Image resizer - vBulletin.org Forum, so it is possible to install it.

[Mr. X]

Cool, can we get it installed? BTW I see eBay has started doing this - makes it much quicker & simpler to use. Even includes a few basic editing tools (some Microsoft community websites have had something similar for years with a few additional editing controls ) - but the automatic sizing is the main thing.

[Stephan Whelan]

That auto-resizing is actually done "on-the-fly" so strictly speaking won't stop large download times or anything like that - if there is to be auto-resizing options i'd suggest something that runs server side would be best.

Anyway - no new modules are going to be installed until after we upgrade to the latest version and move to our shiny new server.

[trux]

Ah, yes, you are right - I did not see that it is not a server side resizing, but a plain and simple resizing on the client size. That's indeed useless for this purpose.

In fact, it looks like no module is needed at all - the server-side resizing is already available in vBulletin. And it looks like it was there since a while. All you need to do is configuring vBulletin accordingly. You just need to set the global file and image limits differently than the attachment limits, and allow the automated resizing. If the limits are both same, no resizing will be done, of course. So for example currently I see the limits at attachments set to 50MB and 1024x1024, and I suspect the same values are used also globally. In fact, for the attachment much lower sizes should be chosen (i.e. 4MB and 800x600) while much higher size than that for the global sizes should be used - i.e. 50MB and 4000x4000. The server will then resize the uploaded file to the max attachment size limit.

More exact instructions may be found in vBulletin documentation, or on their forum - for example here is a rather short and clear explanation: Attachment pics not being resized - vBulletin Community Forum

[Mr. X]

Upload speed wasn't the concern, having to open an image editor & play around everytime is becoming a bit of a drag, and a difficulty for others. I don't require any fancy editing features, it seems reasonable to open an image editor for that. [The Microsoft control is/was client-side. Not sure about eBay. Server-side sounds fine.]

[trux]

The upload is not of a concern - it happens only once per file. But with the plug-in solution mentioned above, the problem is if you upload a huge file, it won't get reduced on the server, but always downloaded full and only redimensioned in clients browsers once downloaded (for every page access with that image again and again) - that would terribly slow down the connection, and put too much load on the server and possibly saturate the bandwidth. Hence that solution is not well suitable for this purpose.

The default built-in feature of vBulletin for file resizing is quite sufficient in fact. It only needs that Stephan enables it in the configuration, which is a simple task, and he'll certainly do it once he completes the move to the new server.

[Mr. X]

Originally Posted by trux

The upload is not of a concern - it happens only once per file. But with the plug-in solution mentioned above, the problem is if you upload a huge file, it won't get reduced on the server, but always downloaded full and only redimensioned in clients browsers once downloaded (for every page access with that image again and again) - that would terribly slow down the connection, and put too much load on the server and possibly saturate the bandwidth. Hence that solution is not well suitable for this purpose. ...

Yes, that sounds like a poor way to do it. Good to hear the other approach can & will be implemented. Excellent. Thanks.