Image hosting solution for BuddyPress, NextGen, etc

  • cvtbrian

    (@cvtbrian)


    7 years, 4 months ago

    Hello. I am working on building a new WordPress site for my local hiking club. I have a managed WordPress plan with DreamHost.

    Images will be a big part of the site, and I am looking for a cost-effective (a.k.a. free or cheap) solution for storing and serving them. I am planning to use BuddyPress with rtMedia so members can upload personal photos, profile pics, etc. Also planning to use NextGen or a similar album plugin for “official” photos and allowing members to upload to those albums as well. These will likely NOT be optimized images.

    I have looked at the WP Smush plugin as an option for optimizing images as they are uploaded, but the free version appears to have a 1MB limit on source images. I know my photos tend to be 4-5MB, so that wouldn’t work, and the Pro version is a little pricey at $20 per month.

    If I sign up for a CDN solution such as the Amazon S3/Cloudfront plugin, do I need to be concerned with image optimization? Will the CDN be able to serve up full size images without much lag time? If optimization is still needed, any recommendations for a free or inexpensive plugin that optimizes large images as they are uploaded?

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • lisa

    (@contentiskey)

    7 years, 4 months ago

    look into: https://jetpack.com/support/photon/

    Thread Starter cvtbrian

    (@cvtbrian)

    7 years, 4 months ago

    Thanks Lisa. With Photon, I believe uploaded images would still be stored on the web server. I am limited to 30GB with my hosting plan, and I’m afraid our images may exceed that amount. That’s why I was looking at Amazon S3/Cloudfront.

    lisa

    (@contentiskey)

    7 years, 4 months ago

    “Your images will now be served dynamically from the global WordPress.com cloud.”

    might be worth sending a note to jetpack support to confirm where the images will be served from.
    https://jetpack.com/contact-support/

    Thread Starter cvtbrian

    (@cvtbrian)

    7 years, 4 months ago

    Thanks, I just submitted a ticket on their website.

    I know W3 Total Cache has an option to remove local copies of files from the web server once they are pushed to Amazon S3, which is what I would prefer. I just want to get an idea as to how Amazon S3/Cloudfront does performance wise with images that have not been optimized.

    maksibec

    (@maksibec)

    7 years, 4 months ago

    Have you thought about some kind of automatic resizing upon user upload? If the pics are really there for the BP user & stream & so on but not for printing or HQ publication, then compression should not be a problem, should it?

    I am confronted with a similar issue: moving our groups pics from currently many ownCloud sub-folders to either (hidden) BuddyPress sites/user & group albums on our official WP installation (had a look at rtMedia and NextGEN as well) or to some extra community gallery app such as Piwigo. A BP solution would mean less accounts for each user, most information in one place, where a solution such as Piwigo would mean much more control and powerful media edit (eg. automated resizing upon uploading) options.

    Thread Starter cvtbrian

    (@cvtbrian)

    7 years, 4 months ago

    Since I wrote this post, I installed the free version of rtMedia and explored the settings. It does give size options for serving up images (thumbnail, medium, large), which creates separate image files for each (plus the original). So more storage space taken up to achieve faster load times. There is also a compression percentage setting for jpg images, which I guess I will need to experiment with. With these options, I’m thinking I won’t need a separate plugin to optimize photos as they are uploaded.

    I looked at Flickr as an option for hosting our photos and using a plugin to display them on the WP site, but as you said, that would require our users to create separate Flickr accounts in order to upload photos to community albums. Many of our users are not that tech savvy, and I would prefer to keep everything in-house.

    Yesterday I set up Amazon S3 and Cloudfront accounts and installed their plugins. I have it set up to copy uploaded images to S3 and then remove the local copy to save space on the web server. I hope that turns out to be a good decision.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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