After each project I seem to run up against the same problem - I design and build a CMS site and then hand over to the client to manage their own content. BUt they always seem to struggle when it comes to resizing images, and I don’t have many good options for them.
They all have digital camera’s and can take images of their products/projects but of course these are massive in their original format.
What options are there to enable them to resize their own images to a sensible size?
I have suggested things like http://www.picresize.com/ but this is fairly cumbersome as you need to upload each 3mb file to resize it. Often I just end up saying “send them to me on CD and I’ll resize”.
Unless you can train your clients in Photshop or GIMP then they will have to upload the photos to somewhere or send them to you on CD.
I have a similar problem with artists who are technically defficient with cameras and pc’s so training them is pretty impossible! they end up sending the cd’s in to us.
Photo processing like TESCO do is also a pain but they use an applet to upload folders of images - still takes hours though.
Yeah, I agree. However, usually I feel a bit embarrassed that after promising them that they can manage their own content I can’t offer them a better solution than picresize.com so always do it for free.
If it turns out that this is a common problem across the industry and not just my lack of knowledge, I may be a little tougher.
It sounds like the sites you are building provide a client CMS. These often have image resizing / thumbnail generating facilities in-built. What are you using?
Usually you can download a simple image editor that will save images for the web. Macs come with iPhoto which saves images for email etc with one click. So there should be plenty of options.
If the images are usually going to be a consistent size - say for a product catalogue for example - I use a program called ‘quick web photo resizer’ from www.dzsoft.com, which is really easy - set the size, drag the images in, drag the resized images out. It has to be bought of course, but it’s not expensive.
I built a php script using the imageGD library that takes a full res image and sizes it to multiple sizes (necessary for the site) and saves the files. Then, in the future if the client ever wants to change the size of an image on the site, or add another size, they just update the image sizes list and run a script to re-process ALL the images on the site.
I’m sure you can imagine that a full re-process is very resource intensive so it is thrown into a cron queue and ran at night.
This function will re-size a JPEG to a specified width (with a default width of 250 pixels) and save it to the original location. You might need to tweak the path to match the absolute or relative path of the image. Also, note that this function is not secure as-is, as it will allow anyone to resize any image on the user account, and is also open to XSS attacks.
function image_resize($image_path, $new_width) {
list($width, $height) = getimagesize($image_path);
if($width != $new_width) {
$new_height = $height / $width * $new_width;
$image_new = imagecreatetruecolor($new_width, $new_height);
$image = imagecreatefromjpeg($image_path);
imagecopyresampled($image_new, $image, 0, 0, 0, 0, $new_width, $new_height, $width, $height);
imagejpeg($image_new, $image_path);
return TRUE;
}
else {
return FALSE;
}
}
if(image_resize($_GET["image_path"], $_GET["image_width"])) {
printf("Image %s was resized succesfully to a width of %s pixels.", $_GET["image_path"], $_GET["image_width"]);
}
else {
printf("Error: Image %s was not resized. It already has the desired width.", $_GET["image_path"]);
}
That link pointing to “The Tragic Comedy that is Rich Text Editing on the Web” was just what I needed today.
I’ve had a client yelling because the previous e-com CMS implementation let her easily edit content on the web using her Mac, and the new CMS that I chose has an editor that works best with IE. Thus, the new CMS is perceived as a failure, not user friendly, and I’m being asked to do even the tiniest update. I edit the source and skip the WYSIWYG editor.
The problem is made worse by sites like YouTube and Facebook, which teach people you can upload anything, from any browser, and get presentable results. This is why my client’s previous e-com site was loaded with 2100x3000px 3MB images that she’d resized by dragging corners in the WYSIWYG editor. Nobody at the service provider cared enough to tell her that it shouldn’t be done that way. Instead, they probably waited for her to go over her bandwidth allocation.