What are your thoughts?

It would be great if Talkyard could automatically resize and compress images in the browser before upload.

Right now, users have to manually shrink every image to stay under 1 MB, which makes posting photos a bit of a hassle and probably discourages people from sharing more. If the forum handled this automatically, it would make things much smoother and help keep storage under control at the same time.

Modern browsers can easily do this with a small client-side package — for example, something like browser-image-compression, pica, or compressorjs. These tools resize and compress images right in the browser, so the server never has to do any heavy lifting.

It’s a small change that could make a big difference in how enjoyable and efficient it is to use the forum.

@stefanybags Interesting idea, don't think I knew about browser-image-compression, pica, or compressorjs. I'll have a look

It’s an easy task — using an LLM, you could probably get it done in two weekends, including testing and going live. Just add a dual image upload interface (keeping both the old and new versions) and enable automatic .webp conversion from any image format. That way, almost every uploaded image will come out at around 100–150 KB max with excellent quality.

@stefanybags Yes 2 weekends makes sense, but, would also need to write automated tests, and evaluate & review the image resizing libraries (for security issues f.ex.), so I'd say 2*2 = 4 weekends, hmm, maybe documentation —> 5, and feedback + 1 or 2 bug fixes —> 7 weekends?

A problem is, there's lots of nice to have & somewhat quick fixes and they add up to quite many days and weekends o.O

I'll try to add this to the to do priority list anyway, hmm, seems I'll need to make it possible to change from topic type Chat to Idea :- )

Thanks for the idea & feedback!