CDN for Unplash images

Hi guys,

My clients blog is running very fast. We’re on Digital Ocean, using Cloudflare, with a mininal Ghost template. The problem is the images. What attracted my client is the possibility to find images fast using Unplash.

With that said, the website does have a problem with Google Page Speed and other. Size of the images. I have read that is a issue with Ghost, but I’m not complaining, of course. :slight_smile:

I want to know if someone has a solution to self host on a CDN images from Unplash in a way that I dont have to download and upload manually to Ghost. For images manually uploaded to the site is not a problem to us, since we will use a CDN for that. But did someone comeup with an idea for Unplash images, that is linking directly to unplash website?

Thanks!!
Ed

@efilipe Unsplash images are already served from a CDN, I’m not sure what benefit you’d get from serving from your own CDN.

If you really want to do it then downloading and manually uploading is the only route without breaking Unsplash’s ToS for their API.

1 Like

Might be on a CDN, but not optmized? Look at my ranking on Google Page Speed.
image

The reason:
image

GTMetrix:

image

image

Unsplash does serve optimised images, what PageSpeed is recommending is that you serve smaller thumbnail images rather than optimising them.

There’s not a great deal you can do about using thumbnails rather than full size images right now unless you download, resize then upload. That would then mean that anywhere you display larger versions the image would appear blurry.

Thumbnails in general is not something that Ghost supports at the moment but some improvements are planned

2 Likes

Hi guys, amazing reply! Thanks! Ghost is an amazing CMS. I’m very happy with it’s simplicity. I’ve been a Wordpress user for many years. The conclusion is: Less is more!! Hope to see this image problem being solved, but I can’t really complain! Thank you!! :slight_smile:

On my website https://vasanthdeveloper.com, I am trying to solve the exact same issue to serve scaled images. I am building a separate expressJS application just to do that. If anyone is interested, please check out:
https://gitlab.com/vasanthdeveloper/clask
Also, note that there is no documentation yet for this project and it has not been implemented on my website yet.

Thank You :slight_smile:

My website looks fine, but still I have 2mb of unsplash images on my home, and there are actually only 9 images. I’m thinking of downloading those images and manually upload them. Any suggetion? I host on my own server, Digital Ocean. Thanks!

Sure, this is what I do.

  • I download the image locally (mac)
  • I resize them to 1440px (width), I don’t care about the height
  • I compress the images via JPEGmini
  • upload them in Ghost

Before JPEGmini I was using photoshop and that was my main pain. With this tool, the workflow is quick and easy!

1 Like

This is not due to compression or having/not having a CDN, it’s due to not having thumbnail support in Ghost yet, as mentioned above.

2MB for 9 full-size images is pretty good. The images we pull in from Unsplash are already the resized and compressed versions, if you’re going to recompress them further then you’ll only be able to do so by dropping quality significantly.

This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.