Wiki Image Reset

Today I deleted the complete wiki/images/thumb folder leading in complete removal of all thumbnails generated by the wiki.
The Reason
The thumbnail folder had an impressive size of 472 Megabyte! Most of the thumbnails were bigger than the original files. That’s not good for the visitors with low bandwidths, because they have to wait ages to load an image and not good for us because it uses a lot of our traffic and disk capacity.
The Solution
I changed the method of converting images, instead of converting them to 48bit or higher or whatever images, we now convert them to png 8bit images with:
$wgCustomConvertCommand = "/usr/bin/convert -resize %wx%h %s PNG8:%d";
The Disadvantages

  • This may cause trouble with cached pages, if you don’t see an image, please append ?action=purge to the URL.
  • Converting images takes more time due to higher compression
  • Pages with a lot of images could time out on the first request. Do a second one in this case.

If there occur any problems, please contact me.

1 comment so far

  1. nh March 7, 2008 22:26

    you could at least mention.

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