[#6222] Client Side Image Resizing and Compression

To get users using CB communities, they need to be able to load pics quickly and easily. If they take a photo on an iphone, and it can't be uploaded because the image is too large (ie. greater than the CB install max limit) or it takes 30-60 seconds to upload, they'll stick to sharing on Facebook or Instagram as it's much easier.

In the past, users would upload the pic from their SD card, resize and compress, then upload, and maybe some users do this nowadays or use a phone app to do so. But people generally do whatever's easier and if they've got the choice of:
a) taking a photo, opening it in an app (or downloading one), choosing what size to save it as, resizing then compressing, then saving, then going back to the CB site, opening and then sharing
versus
b) taking a photo, uploading it using on-the-fly compression/resizing
I'd say any given sane user will choose (b).

Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp use on-the-fly compression using an algorithm like this or this via mobiles .

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Making CB mobile ready and integrating on-the-fly compression/resizing should be a priority. It seems that suitable code exists such as plupload or JIC .

Is there a timeline for this?

Client side resizing and thumbnail cropping is already planned. It wasn't reliably supported until HTML5 officially launched (using canvas elements) and wasn't widely available until just recently due to browser support so it couldn't be implemented until that point. Facebook probably uses this technology now, but it absolutely did not before. I wager they still have a fallback of some sort as the only way to do client side resizing before HTML5 was through Flash or Java applet. My point is it's extremely new still.

The client side resizing will likely just become a part of our validation code and be done entirely silently based off the image fields settings. I've added a feature ticket to keep track of the client size resizing, but it's unlikely to make it into CB 2.1.

forge.joomlapolis.com/issues/6222

As with all things here no there is no timeline; we simply get to features as we get to them and we continue to provide no release dates, sorry. This isn't a simple addition as it requires all our upload code to handle byte arrays for images instead of the file it self. So I've a lot of rewriting to do before this can happen.

Thanks Kyle. Would be great if you could make this a priority as it will make a massive difference to the usability of CB sites. Cheers, David