I just moved our Omeka Classic library to an Omeka S installation. We were relying a lot on the Admin Images plug-in to display images in our exhibitis and pages.
The recent implementation of assets has been really helpful and I have moved the original images from Admin Images (selecting the images with no item linked in the omeka_files table and downloading them from the original directory of Omeka Classic to the asset directory of Omeka S. I then created a csv with the names of the images to load them into the asset table of our database. This way, we were able to bulk import the assets and keep the original name of the images.
However, Assets as of now do not have the ability to be made into large/square/small thumbnails like medias can and like Admin Images allowed. Therefore, some pages are really heavy.
Is there any development leaning towards this or should I just download the fullsize/square/small images from my previous Omeka site ?
I don’t think we’re planning to have the “derivative” or thumbnailing process happen for the Assets: they’re purposely used as-is so users can tailor the exact cropping and dimensions and so on.
If you do want to use the smaller sizes, downloading the existing ones is an option as you say, as is resizing them locally with the graphics editor of your choice before uploading.
Indeed, I did crop and resize images to fit pages. To have less assets as they are quite difficult to navigate through (we already have about 400) I chose to load the original file and use it in several cases (for example, an image in an article will also be the thumbnail for the presentation of that article on our frontpage). In other cases I cannot choose, as is the case for items and item sets chosen thumbnails that had to be big enough to be used as large thumbnails when making a list of itemsets for example but are smaller when calling them through a shortcode for example.
In the case of articles and exhibits unfortunately, they are sometimes quite heavy and people from the IT department have raised this as an issue, making some pages take longer to load. I guess it was just not best practice on my part to choose to have just one size fits all.
But it’s not a major issue, I’m going to try and encourage people to use media more in articles and exhibits when possible and as I said I will load smaller versions to help pages load more quickly.
I’d say one thing to look at also is just the format… I don’t know that the dimensions of, for example, the Nagasaki image that loads on that front page are a big problem, but the fact that it’s a PNG instead of JPEG might be. This looks like it might be the case for many of your other assets as well. For this type of “photographic” content a JPEG is going to be much much smaller than a PNG at the same dimensions and perceptual quality.