Hiya!
There definitely seems to be consensus for this one, but I couldn’t find it in the existing Ideas so far. While I do have another one related to WebP, that one is really more about adding support for WebP format. :)
This Idea is based on another magic trick that I do with the websites I own and/or manage myself, so I have experience with it already.
One thing that would probably do wonders though, would be if the platform could automatically optimise all media uploads, so that the resulting file sizes could be crunched and squashed down to something more reasonable - especially for mobile users. While this can sometimes work best by converting the formats, it can also be possible to optimise just about anything without changing formats. As a safety net though, it may be worth keeping both the original and optimised versions, just in case something goes wrong and a rollback is needed.
The way that this could ideally work, is that the original media (such as a photo) could be uploaded as normal so as not to break any workflows or slow the user down and initially publish the content with the original non-optimised versions of the media. After that happens, the server could then do the number crunching in the background and swap out the original version with the optimised one when it’s ready, so that future page loads will get the nicer one, but also making sure something is always available in the meantime.
Where possible, it might also be helpful to have all existing uploads optimised as well, but given the potentially huge archives that exist, it may be more tricky to do. Based on this, my ideal solution would probably be something like this. As with anything that could affect important content, I’d also suggest allowing Administrators and Community Managers (possibly Moderators too!) to have the ability to adjust the settings or enable/disable such features as they see fit. The concept below is what I’d probably suggest as a possible default though.
- For all NEW uploads after the feature is released and enabled, automatically trigger optimisation and send it to the queue for processing
- For all EXISTING uploads prior to when the feature existed and/or posted when the feature was disabled, handle them as follows
- Automatically queue up recent uploads that haven’t been processed yet, along with any that are attached to content which is/was recently accessed (based on reasonable timeframes)
- Don’t touch anything that was uploaded more than X days ago and hasn’t been accessed recently, but if it gets viewed again, send it to the queue
- For anything where the media was rolled back by a Moderator/Manager/Admin, don’t attempt to automatically re-process it again if the moderator set a “hold” flag on it
- If the feature is disabled after optimised media has been processed, allow the Community Manager/Administrator to decide whether to switch everything back to the original versions, or keep showing the optimised versions of anything that’s already been processed - but retain both versions in storage anyway, since there’s not much value in repeatedly re-optimising the same media files all over again.
- If the feature is later re-enabled, this approach would allow the already optimised media to be rapidly restored without having to wait.
While my own personal preference is to optimise all existing media on my own sites when I set up this sort of feature, I don’t have anywhere near as much of the stuff as all the combined inSided powered communities do. Given that the ideal position would be to try to strike a reasonable balance between performance for the user, platform performance on the server - and also not giving inSided a monster sized AWS bill from crunching millions of media files that might not get viewed anyway - I felt this would be a reasonable trade-off.
You’ll be amazed at how much this improves page loads and data usage!
