Tell me more ×
WordPress Answers is a question and answer site for WordPress developers and administrators. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote -1 down vote favorite

I've done quite a bit of testing.

  1. When uploading 4000px wide images, quality comes out terrible, jagged edges. Have experienced this in other situations, so I uploaded 1280 and 1936px wide originals with much better result.
  2. Regardless of image quality setting in Options>Image tab, the 720px wide large photos are 300K, 400K, huge; as I said, NO change with different image quality settings.
  3. At a ridiculously low setting of 20%, the image quality is no worse. Does this setting even work?
  4. The built-in Thickbox lightbox functionality is very slow, even with some 60K images I pre-sized and uploaded. Takes 4 seconds minimum to display image. A second pass through, with the images in cache is much quicker. But the delay is not much different on first pass with a 60K or 400K image.
  5. The built-in WordPress upload with 3 image re-sizes is a very good result but not accessible from nextGen.
  6. Others need to use this, so it needs to be an easy tool.
share|improve this question
4  
What is your question here? – Rarst♦ May 2 '12 at 20:02
"At a ridiculously low setting of 20%, the image quality is no worse. Does this setting even work?" This comment and from the comments on my answer that say »WordPress is a tool built for clients that don't have Photoshop.« I have to simply close vote this question. You either have plugins installed, that modify the uploader (which we don't know from your Q), or you have other problems with your install. Over all, this question simply is a (paid job/) task for a developer inspecting your setup and not for WP.SE. – kaiser Dec 15 '12 at 4:33

closed as not a real question by kaiser, toscho♦ Dec 15 '12 at 11:14

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

You're better off with doing your image optimization on your desktop side. Web apps are just for the rescue. Nothing else.

share|improve this answer
6. Others need to use this, so I need a tool that's easy like this. I find it very convenient functionally. Thanks very much for responding quickly. Maybe others will comment on 2, 3, and 4. – Darlene Apr 13 '12 at 1:39
#2 is the worst problem. I can upload images that are 100K and they are 300K on the server. Any help? – Darlene May 2 '12 at 13:45
Sorry, but no. As I said above, you´re trying to do photoshop tasks on a server. Also: This isn´t a question for WPSE. – kaiser May 2 '12 at 14:22
WordPress is a tool built for clients that don't have Photoshop. Why would an image sizing tool make the resultant image larger than the original? Are you saying that businesses who use WordPress are by default going to get an amateur website? – Darlene May 2 '12 at 18:21
Every time I upload new images, even pre-sized images, the load time becomes a snail pace. Can you show me some NextGen galleries that are quick and how that might be achieved? – Darlene May 2 '12 at 18:23
show 1 more comment
up vote 0 down vote

Late answer, but regarding #2 and #3, it appears the NextGen gallery requires PHP to have register_globals set to "on" in order for the quality setting to be used properly. The quality setting is stored as part of a global array of options. When globals are not enabled in PHP on the server, the function which saves uploaded images attempts to get the quality from this global variable, fails, and then reverts to using a default quality of 100%. I've tested this with NextGen 1.9.7 using the GD library for image processing.

Once I enabled register_globals for the site, the quality setting in NextGen worked properly and I was able to verify uploaded images at different quality settings having significantly different file sizes (and visual quality as expected).

share|improve this answer
I think you should flag that to Photocrati as something they should fix in their 2.0 release, due out early next year! – webaware Dec 15 '12 at 1:25

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.