File Manager vs Image Manager for Photos - 10/27/21 09:56 PM
Greetings . . .
I wanted to start a thread to discuss the technical details behind photo hosting here at the II Forums. I realize that it is not as simple as Drag-and-Drop – but we have great capabilities for creating detailed illustrated posts.
First let’s start with the basic usability pros and cons. The File Manager is just a click away whenever one is creating a new Discussion Forum post. The Gallery Forum requires as special visit to upload photos before going to the Discussion Forum to start a new thread or to enter a response.
Let’s dig into the details.
With the last change made to the Gallery Forum “Photo Library” the Image Manager will accept up to 20 images in each gallery posting – and will accept un-cropped images up to 3MB – scaling them down to a reasonable size for rendering. Take for example the image of the piston from the Unicorn Chevy Six post:
The utility automatically creates the IMG tags to the file on disk. The uncropped version of the file is handled only once during the upload. Once re-scaled the image lands on disk it can be referenced by image tagged link in a Forum post or anywhere else you choose on the internet with the https: URL
|img]https://www.inliners.org/ubbthreads/gallery/19/full/491.jpg[/img| - which is what one includes in a Discussion Forum thread.
As a result there is no reason to use the “Enter an Image” widget in the discussion forum:
Simply copy and paste the Full size link from the gallery post:
in between the lines/paragraphs of the post where you want it to appear.
Now let’s dig into the technical details of how an image ends up on our screens.
When a post is selected from say the Active Topics list - there is one call to the PHP hypertext pre-processor to fetch the discussion thread from the SQL database underneath the site - look closely at the URLs and you will see the reference to ‘ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php’. Once fetched from the database the pre-processed content is sent to the user’s browser for rendering – including URL references to images in flat files on disk. This image of a piston is just 16 kilobits – the Image Manager utility compressed the already small (23K) image that I screen captured from the HP Monsters video.
Now let’s look at what happens when we use the File Manager to house images. Take for example TTW’s posting on converting to an open driveline:
https://www.inliners.org/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=98845#Post98777
again notice the call to PHP to fetch the thread.
Closer inspection of the images in the thread reveals TTW’s technique – placing File Manager calls between image tags
|img]https://www.inliners.org/ubbthreads/ubbt...haft-whoops.jpg[/img|
Notice the call to PHP in the URL. This call back to the pre-processor on the server is necessary because the File Manager’s disk cache is not housed in a publicly addressable directory. There is overhead in every call and each image is a separate call. This overhead includes updating the download counters:
Moreover this single image is 248K and TTW has asked for that size limit be increased – because cropping high-res photos by dimensions (width/height) yields widely different file sizes (read trial & error hassle . . . pita).
But compare this one file to the Unicorn Chevy Six posting that contains 27 images – the whole lot comes in at under 850K.
https://www.inliners.org/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=98918&page=1
One thing that comes to mind is the desktop tooling one might be using for cropping/scaling. I like the TechSmith ‘Snagit’ tool. I used it to capture the photos for Unicorn Chevy Six post with the video running in YouTube. You issue the Snagit capture command and the browser screen freezes the playback so that you can capture a still image. The same can be done with Raw photos downloaded from one’s phone or digital camera. View with them with the native PC/Mac photo browser and Snag cropped scaled down images for upload to the II Forums.
I am happy to assist anyone in getting their content online.
Regards,
stock49
I wanted to start a thread to discuss the technical details behind photo hosting here at the II Forums. I realize that it is not as simple as Drag-and-Drop – but we have great capabilities for creating detailed illustrated posts.
First let’s start with the basic usability pros and cons. The File Manager is just a click away whenever one is creating a new Discussion Forum post. The Gallery Forum requires as special visit to upload photos before going to the Discussion Forum to start a new thread or to enter a response.
Let’s dig into the details.
With the last change made to the Gallery Forum “Photo Library” the Image Manager will accept up to 20 images in each gallery posting – and will accept un-cropped images up to 3MB – scaling them down to a reasonable size for rendering. Take for example the image of the piston from the Unicorn Chevy Six post:
The utility automatically creates the IMG tags to the file on disk. The uncropped version of the file is handled only once during the upload. Once re-scaled the image lands on disk it can be referenced by image tagged link in a Forum post or anywhere else you choose on the internet with the https: URL
|img]https://www.inliners.org/ubbthreads/gallery/19/full/491.jpg[/img| - which is what one includes in a Discussion Forum thread.
As a result there is no reason to use the “Enter an Image” widget in the discussion forum:
Simply copy and paste the Full size link from the gallery post:
in between the lines/paragraphs of the post where you want it to appear.
Now let’s dig into the technical details of how an image ends up on our screens.
When a post is selected from say the Active Topics list - there is one call to the PHP hypertext pre-processor to fetch the discussion thread from the SQL database underneath the site - look closely at the URLs and you will see the reference to ‘ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php’. Once fetched from the database the pre-processed content is sent to the user’s browser for rendering – including URL references to images in flat files on disk. This image of a piston is just 16 kilobits – the Image Manager utility compressed the already small (23K) image that I screen captured from the HP Monsters video.
Now let’s look at what happens when we use the File Manager to house images. Take for example TTW’s posting on converting to an open driveline:
https://www.inliners.org/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=98845#Post98777
again notice the call to PHP to fetch the thread.
Closer inspection of the images in the thread reveals TTW’s technique – placing File Manager calls between image tags
|img]https://www.inliners.org/ubbthreads/ubbt...haft-whoops.jpg[/img|
Notice the call to PHP in the URL. This call back to the pre-processor on the server is necessary because the File Manager’s disk cache is not housed in a publicly addressable directory. There is overhead in every call and each image is a separate call. This overhead includes updating the download counters:
Moreover this single image is 248K and TTW has asked for that size limit be increased – because cropping high-res photos by dimensions (width/height) yields widely different file sizes (read trial & error hassle . . . pita).
But compare this one file to the Unicorn Chevy Six posting that contains 27 images – the whole lot comes in at under 850K.
https://www.inliners.org/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=98918&page=1
One thing that comes to mind is the desktop tooling one might be using for cropping/scaling. I like the TechSmith ‘Snagit’ tool. I used it to capture the photos for Unicorn Chevy Six post with the video running in YouTube. You issue the Snagit capture command and the browser screen freezes the playback so that you can capture a still image. The same can be done with Raw photos downloaded from one’s phone or digital camera. View with them with the native PC/Mac photo browser and Snag cropped scaled down images for upload to the II Forums.
I am happy to assist anyone in getting their content online.
Regards,
stock49