Thumbnail Quality
I have played with some configuration settings (imagecreatetruecolor (GD Library 2.0) set to default), and with the size of the thumbnail resizing in the HTML (although I controlled this from the Admin area - set all to width of 130), and the results are dramatically improved. However, in the early days, we had some glitches with photo uploads, in that the upload of large photos was not completed and a blank page returned. One of the attempts to fix this involved changing the imagecreatetruecolor (GD Library 2.0) setting to manual override.
However, further tests on 12 June found that the upload of photos caused a white screen to occur (blank page returned instead of image added page) with a large 950 kb test file, irrespective of whether I had the GD Library set to default or manual override. So I have turned it back on. It works fine with normal-sized photos. Maybe we are being over-generous by offering a 1 MB upload. Perhaps that should be 200 kb?
However, further tests on 12 June found that the upload of photos caused a white screen to occur (blank page returned instead of image added page) with a large 950 kb test file, irrespective of whether I had the GD Library set to default or manual override. So I have turned it back on. It works fine with normal-sized photos. Maybe we are being over-generous by offering a 1 MB upload. Perhaps that should be 200 kb?My bet is that the image problem is more likely to do with bandwidth and timeouts. I found a really in-depth article on what could cause image problems at:
https://geodesicsolutions.com/products/geohelp/index.php?x=&mod_id=2&id=128
In short, it could be that the PHP script is timing out while waiting for a 1 MB file to upload. The PHP script timeout is 30 seconds. I reckon 1 MB on my cable connection (which is asymmetrical - fast downloads but slow uploads) would take round about that time. Further, the current chloekirkhope.com server seems to be on a quite slow connection, so even superfast at this end may be superslow at the other! And on top of that, the article says the performance of the server has an impact. Large graphics take quite a while to thumbnail, so it could be timing out for that reason too.
When it goes on the live server, we may get (a) better connection speed, (b) better server performance, and (c) possibly better GD Library handling.
In summary, I think we should leave it as the “default” setting (ie, lovely thumbnails), but consider changing the limit from 1 MB to something smaller. (That’s just one setting change, and one Help text change (http://www.chloekirkhope.com/admin/index.php?a=14&b=10&l=22).) Then, we’ll see how it goes on the production server.