Uploadify and Image Compression

Question

I am using Uploadify on one of my client's web sites to allow them to upload a large amount of pictures at once to their photo gallery.

I am seeing issues lately. They seem to upload large photographs (3 MB and above). I am wondering, is it possible to compress (reduce their size) on the client side, instead of doing it on the server (just like facebook does it). I know I could easily do it on the server, but I am working on another project right now, where I am expecting a large flow of photo uploads. It would require significant amount of CPU time to process them all. So I thought, I'd ask about the client side processing.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Image resize is not the same as image compression.

Difference between resize and compression:

When you compress you get an image with same dimensions at lower quality.
When you resize you are getting same quality at different dimensions.

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Anyway, I developed a javascript library called JIC to solve that problem. It allows you to compress jpg and png on the client side 100% with javascript and no external libraries required!

You can try the demo here : http://makeitsolutions.com/labs/jic and get the sources here : https://github.com/brunobar79/J-I-C

Hope you like it.

Answer 2

You won't be able to compress JPG images much using zip or similar algorithms - they are already close to optimum in themselves. You'd have to resize them on client side. For that, see e.g.

• Image resize before upload

• jquery + flash: looking for plugin that resize images before upload

• Image resizing client-side with javascript before upload to the server