Photon Question – Limit on Disk Space usage?

  • Resolved Patrick Whitty-Clarke

    (@zerodegreeburn)


    9 years, 7 months ago

    Hi,

    I’ve developed a website recently which has a very large number of images. I wanted to serve appropriate images to all users, so I added quite a few add_image_size‘s and now we have got into a situation where the site is a lot bigger than we thought.

    I’ve looked into some options for deferring images to another host and Photon looks quite good. However, as we now have 50GB of images on this WP install, I’m wondering if using Jetpack photon for this would constitute abuse of the service? I’m assuming it would, but I can’t find any usage limitations on the home page, but I definitely still want to check first before activating it!

    Most of my add_image_sizes are just smaller crops in the same aspect ratio of an original 16:9 image. If I understand correctly, Photon would create these automatically for me so I perhaps wouldn’t need so many intermediate smaller sizes, I could just refactor my theme so the large image only shows and all of the smaller images get created on the fly. I think this would reduce the disk space usage of my install quite a bit.

    Any help or advice would be much appreciated, thanks. I’ve also looked into using a separate image CDN and WordPress plugin made by HumanMade – https://github.com/humanmade/S3-Uploads which might be a better option.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/jetpack/

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Author Jeremy Herve

    (@jeherve)

    Jetpack Mechanic ??

    I’m wondering if using Jetpack photon for this would constitute abuse of the service?

    No, there is no limit to the number of images you can cache with Photon. You can activate the module without worrying about this! ??

    If I understand correctly, Photon would create these automatically for me so I perhaps wouldn’t need so many intermediate smaller sizes

    That’s partially correct. Photon only downloads the original image and creates intermediate smaller sizes on the fly, as you mentioned, but it can only do so if you’ve specified the image size in the post content, or in your theme. In your theme, that basically means that to be able to serve the right image size (and not just a large image resized with CSS), you need to create an intermediate smaller size, as you’ve done so far. Photon will then use this parameter to generate and serve the new image size.

    I think it’s also safer to keep using the right image sizes in your theme, so you don’t entirely depend on a third-party service like Photon. If you ever decide to stop using Photon in the future, it will be easier to do so if you already have all the image sizes ready.

    I think the plugin you linked to earlier is a good solution to your problem: you’ll get rid of any space restrictions you may have with your current hosting provider, and if you activate Photon as well you’ll save on your monthly Amazon fees: your readers won’t be querying the images from S3; they’ll be accessing images that are cached and served by Photon. It’s also future-proof, as you can easily stop using Photon, or switch to a different hosting provider later on, without having to force resize all your images.

    I hope this clarifies things a bit.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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