« Articles / Site Image Handling Updates

2026.02.15

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The site has been tweaked to serve some images as their original files and scale them down in the browser, rather than using SLIR to downsize them.
This makes the graphics look sharper on displays where the contents are scaled to above 100%.

I've seen that a lot of sites do this now, probably for a number of reasons: 
more devices using display scaling, use of flat/metro-style 'graphics' with small file sizes and the increased range of web graphics formats like webp and avif.

The site now thumbnails WebP and AVIF image formats in its content folders.
It also presents the thumbnails in a cropped format in the images tables, so that they now look indistinguishable from images in 'real' JPG, PNG and GIF formats.

It does this with a method parallel to SLIR that I cooked up using PHP's GD library, which is actually remarkably simple to get going.

I took quite a lot of inspiration from Nathan Campos' Photo Viewer script, which is a really nice utility.

One problem with running a site that is hand-coded is that, while internet 'standards' move more quickly now, there are very few independent sites left that are actively maintained and developed ...
There are even fewer that aren't based on generalised platforms like Wordpress.
It means that fewer tools are available to streamline site development and fewer places where you can even go for a consult.

Anyway, with SLIR starting to show its age, it's nice to have a working parallel method of image resize for the site that can easily be expanded to handle JPG, PNG and GIF formats.

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