A wish: more/smarter image options

[Cathy_Sarisky]

I’ve worked on improving loading speed on several themes recently. While Pagespeed is not a perfect reflection of user experience, the fact that Google factors in whether a page is ‘fast enough’ to be a search result makes it meaningful.

A couple things that would make it easier to serve the right images to the right browser:

1. A slightly smarter img_url format=?? option. If my client is mostly uploading pngs, then format=webp is going to be a huge reduction in loading times. But if my client has all highly compressed jpgs, then format=webp will actually make the files bigger. It would be awesome if there were a way to only convert if it makes the image smaller, or to detect what format an image was uploaded in, so that I could selectively convert to webp. As it is, I can’t optimize for a mix of images, some of which are highly compressed jpgs and should be left alone, and others are huge pngs.

2. I’m getting hit on Pagespeed scores for loading rectangular images into square spots. (The image is the perfect width, but it’s too tall for the spot, so it gets cropped.) It’d be awesome if the img_url helper also took an aspect ratio argument, or took both width and height.

[neotint]

The practical practioner point in Cathy’s idea is worth considering.

Here’s more user context:

Sharing some tests I did to show how new image format support needs some love in Ghost. It’s far too manual and blackbox.

GhostPro supports webp or avif?

Sharing tests for any future people searching about this. Okay I like to be exacting and detail oriented, especially when learning a new tool/platform, and just did some tests since the Images documentation here: Editor cards says: “Uploaded images will be automatically optimized for the web with lossless compression” But support@ghost said: When uploading images, the supported image formats you use are preserved in Ghost, and used as is if they are 2000px in width or smaller. In testi…

People who value visual quality but also want fast and efficient websites could benefit from improved image format support and control. This would save bandwidth for everyone and make pages load faster.

This aligns with Ghost’s value proposition of fast and efficient hosting.

For me, this is about the ultimate goal of better user-centered design in the admin settings. It involves supporting better image formats and providing minimal/simple user control over image format processing within the admin user interface. This way, anyone who needs high-quality photos for their business can easily work with Ghost. (This includes journalists, photographers, music scenes, media professionals, architects, and many more…)

Pro Admins should be able to specify and control image format types, and parameters, in Ghost’s site settings UI.