Photo compression

[gordon-cs]

Photo compression

[eanyanwu]

🐉 🐲 Steph is embracing inconsistency and messiness! Wow i would not think this day would come. Both client AND server-side resizing?!!?? Wow. Much nice.
I like.
I would suggest at least resize to 300x300? Maybe a bit bigger?

[superpowers11]

Originally, I had planned to do this on the server side, as I didn't want to hold up the client by making it resize an image. I implemented this in the RciInputController (see commit de9113d).
Note: As of now, images are being resized to 200x200 pixels. For some images, when they are enlarged in the modal, this results in some loss of picture quality. Do we want to go this small then?

However, when I tested with an image from my phone, which takes high resolution images (~6.25 MB), I found that there is a limit on the size of Http Requests, such that the image could not even be sent to the server to be resized.

Thus, I am currently looking into a client side solution.
Possibilities here and here

UPDATE: I am thinking of utilizing both a server side resize method and a client side resize method. In the logic, I will implement some check on the file size. If it exceeds the Http Request limit, then we resize in the client. If not, send it on to the server to get resized there.

Pros:

• Improve client side performance whenever possible, so that the browser is not wasting computation resizing images that the server can do asynchronously.

Cons:

• At times, there will be some inconsistency in the quality of one photo that is displayed, because when it is first uploaded, if it is not resized on the client, then the loss of quality will not be reflected until the page is reloaded. I don't think this is too significant of a problem, as users will probably not reload the page while inputting very often.

[superpowers11]

I just realized it is possible to adjust the Http Request content limit, which means all the photos can be resized in the server. This will save us having to maintain two different parts of the code for resizing images.
I am thinking of implementing some limit (reasonably high ceiling -10MB), which would give the user an error saying photo exceeds photo size allowed.
Thoughts?

[eanyanwu]

That seems reasonable by me!

[superpowers11]

Closed with #100