Casper Theme - Post Thumbnails Impacting Site Speed

[andrewmc]

I’m using the default Casper theme and I noticed that on the homepage all the posts load the featured image.

This just seems crazy to me as they are large/heavy images often 1500px wide as they are also used at the top of the actual blog post header area. What ends up happening is that your homepage ends up having to load 10-20 large photos instead of 10-20 small thumbnails.

Don’t get me wrong, the last thing I want is a setup like Wordpress where you generate countless variations of every single image uploaded, but is there any planned option for a post thumbnail or some way of generating this lightweight image.

[chvck]

I’m also experiencing this, I already have thumbnail for old posts so I was able to tweak my import script to use those (my initial homepage payload was 75mb, it’s 0.5mb now!). I can’t do this for future posts though, I had thought that I could write a script to monitor the images directory and auto-generate thumbnails (I can share this once made, it’ll probably be a bit rough and ready though!) but I can’t see a good way to then link to said thumbnail from a handlebars template.

[Juan]

@andrewmc

is there any planned option for a post thumbnail or some way of generating this lightweight image.

@chvck

I’m also experiencing this, I already have thumbnail for old posts so I was able to tweak my import script to use those (my initial homepage payload was 75mb, it’s 0.5mb now!). I can’t do this for future posts though,

The currently 4th most voted idea is directly related to this (thumbnails instead of full images for post index pages; I think this affects all themes). It’s tagged as planned:

Automatic thumbnailing/resizing of image uploads

Some background: [Investigation] Image Processing & Manipulation · Issue #4453 · TryGhost/Ghost · GitHub I’d like to see the ability to automatically generate good jpg/webp thumbnails for both uploaded (embedded) images, as well as article banners. I’ve many times hit the issue of someone uploading a huge, oversized png for the article banner, which ends up being very slow to load especially on the default theme’s article index page (which only needs a small thumbnail).

[chvck]

Just to follow up, I’m using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.saawanapps.photocompress&hl=en_GB for Android to solve this for now. For my use case this works well as I use my phone as my camera. However, I’ve also tweaked the Casper theme so I don’t use feature images for anything other than thumbnails so the thumbnail images are never displayed at a large size. (https://chvck.co.uk/ is you want to see what I mean, the All change post thumbnail is using the app and the image in the post itself is a different, full size one.)

[Juan]

@chvck

I’ve also tweaked the Casper theme so I don’t use feature images for anything other than thumbnails so the thumbnail images are never displayed at a large size. (…) the image in the post itself is a different, full size one.

That’s indeed a workaround for new sites, and a possible template modification that could work for any theme. Old posts would need to be edited to replace the main image with a thumbnail in the post settings and a regular full size image in the post content, one by one, but at least with the added flexibility of possible image captions, without need to wait for custom fields.

However, maybe you need to fix some bug, since your site’s thumbnails are not being displayed at this moment.

[chvck]

However, maybe you need to fix some bug, since your site’s thumbnails are not being displayed at this moment

Thanks for pointing that out!

[Juan]

OK, your thumbnails are working.