Taking care of ALL the thumbnail generation

Hello, my friend, thank you for reaching out!

If I understand what you are saying correctly, the Adaptive Images plugin cannot serve exactly this purpose and it doesn’t have any setting or filter to facilitate this. I am not sure what the benefit of this might be, to be honest. Perhaps you could elaborate a bit more?

Hi! thanks for your answer, Big Takis. ??

One immediate benefit is having a testing env with a minimum overhead, and still with the whole gallery being served.

In general, our image gallery is quite large (about 14k main images, not thumbs). The popular ones though are a subset of that so having thumbs on demand is a good proposition, at least in theory. Thumbs with us are used in a few places, but large detailed images are encouraged so people can see what we have to offer. The advantages of device adaptiveness are obvious, but in our case mostly futile, as CloudFlare (Free) doesn’t support the vary header to make it happen. Anyway, we’re studying the + vs – of keeping a tidy library separated of the thumbs cache, as a way of improved workflow and less resources usage. Your plugin seems a good choice for this. Another alternative that works decently so far is this, but would like to have options, and your plugin seems well-established, and well supported by nice people :). Hope it makes sense, and would consider adding support for std. thumb sizes. Thanks!

Thank you for taking the time to analyze this @alx359! One thing our plugin does not do, and it does not do it by design, is interfere in the way the core is handling its thumbnails. This means it will not create more thumbnail sizes nor will it prevent thumbnail sizes from being produced. And this was a design decision straight from the start because we wanted it to function totally transparently.

Of course it does create its own thumbnails but these live in its cache and are only created if and when they are requested by devices with relevant screen sizes and based on the breakpoints set in its settings. This way we achieve a lot of performance gains because we don’t want to use PHP and CPU for image manipulation and delivery all the time. We want to keep this at a minimal and only when it serves the basic purpose of the plugin, which is to serve as small, but not too small, images based on each device’s dimensions and do this as quickly as possible.

Also we have still only experimentally solved the issue of bypassing the cache of CDNs and making it work to our advantage. There is a special option in the plugin settings page for this.

Not sure if I answered your question. However taking the plugin to another direction is not in our plans at the moment. I’d be happy to discuss anything that might seem interesting or challenging though!

Thank you for elaborating, Takis. Was hoping it was just a matter of adding a few sizes to an array via filter, but I better understand now this is out the scope you’d want to expose the plugin. Thanks anyway!

You are welcome, happy to be of service!