Image Resizing Pain & Ecommerce

Here’s a quick rant about my previous week. After completing an ecommerce store with the amazing Opencart I’m now getting bombarded with questions about images from the client.

After advising the client that uploading roughly a 1000px by 1000px image (the product detail page makes use of the excellent Cloud Zoom …) will create the best looking products and later uploading several products to show how perfect the said images look, I got an email saying “the site currently isn’t working and images not being re-sized”. I died inside a little, as Opencart has automatic image sizing built in, by default. Also, yet again, why is me who receives the all encompassing, deliberately vague problems. Why do some clients have to be so consistently cryptic when describing issues? I wouldn;t walk into a garage and say “my car isn’t working”, I’d be specific as possible, to help the mechanic troubleshoot and fix the problem at hand. Anyway, moving swiftly onwards …

Later, I proceeded to investigate exactly WTF the client was talking about and why they’d think that the site “wasn’t working”. After looking at the 5 products the client had attempted to add I swore a few times and actually performed a “self face-palm”. The client, in their wisdom had decided to ignore my advice and upload the following images sizes: 119px by 257px, 1500px by 400px etc. In summary, exactly the opposite of a 1:1 sized image.

I decided to email the client a quick reply retiterating what I previously said. The reply from the client: “No, that’s not correct. The site isn’t working, you look at [URL] you can see the site adds black borders at the top and bottom of my image”. Right, progress! As the client has decided to be a little more specific and assume I’m not in fact clairvoyant, I can troubleshoot now.

My reply advised the client that resizing oblong shaped images will result in inevitable  cropping and that borders are a result of this crop. This is simply how Opencart works and that because the same image appears in multiple places throughout the site, is totally necessary. If anything, that’s the site working. The solution? Simply upload images with roughly 1:1 proportions and everything will be great. Hell, if I upload a tiny image at 100px by 100px, Opencart will re-size the said image without any cropping.

After the latter reply, the client called up and a sighed a little inside. The client said the sites needs to re-size a wide variety of images as they are getting them from Google Images, Manufacturers and from images they’ve taken themselves. I didn’t get into the benefits of get product photography for ecommerce, but this is a little silly. The conversation now came to “what am [I, the developer] going to do about [the client’s] image sizing errors” (it annoyed me the client referred to this an error, grrr …), after I again explained the benefits of square images. The client ended the call saying I needed to draft an email explaining the issues and offer solutions. I suggested that the client even re-size the image themselves. The only response I got was “You;re the designer, I don’t have expensive designer software or the time to do this” (for the record, I’m not a designer and images can be re-sized freely using Windows Picture Manager) For an easy life, I agreed to email the client everything in one email.

This simply resulted in even more wasted time and came down to one common theme – a client who can’t be arsed to put in a little effort, into their own business. In my email I explained the issue to them for a third time and even suggested some Opencart plugins that allowed the client to re-size and crop images directly from their Opencart admin area. It literally takes a couple of seconds and requires no third party “designer” graphics software at all. Personally, I think it’s a pretty sweet Opencart extension as it integrates directly into the native Opencart file manager. At this point, I stupidly thought I solved the issue for the client and was pretty happy with myself – crises avoid I thought.

The Client Horror Continues …

This is now turning into a proper client horror story. However, I later recieved a further reply from the client. We’re getting into dire saga territory now. The client said “the image cropper update you added in doesn’t work either, as after I crop an image some of my original image is missing, look at the atatched image, it doesn;t crop correctly”. So, I take a quick look at the attached image and let out a loud sigh. Firstly the attached image was a 9MB (yes, that’s Megabytes …) Bitmap file (that’s bad enough) that was 3850px by 850px in resolution. Of bloody course trying to crop that down to something resembling a square image will result in some loss.

Then it gets worse. My client introduces their “IT Guy” [read: friend who apparently works in IT Support and is literally one of those awful wannabie web developers – he knows everything, not]. The “IT Guy” says cropping without borders is possible and sends me links to several free and nasty Opencart extensions that claim to “remove the borders” on resized images. Firstly, all 5 links that were sent are for Opencart version 1.4, which dates back to circa 2010 if I remeber correctly – I’m of course using the latest version to date – 1.5.x. So, immediate fail there. Secondly, all the plugins aren’t actually resizing the image, they are cropping it. The only difference is that the cropped image is then stretched to fill the square proportions and looks god awful. Thirdly, I wouldn’t install them at all as they don’t make use of the excellent vQMod and next to no downloads or comments.

So, yet again, I reply to the client saying this and reiterate what I originally put. I’m yet to hear back from the client as it’s the weekend now, but I’m sure their response will something equally as silly and annoying as before.

For horror clients like mine, never assume soemthing as seemingly simple and uploading images can be anything but pure pain. Why does everything have to be such a pain in the ass all the time? Personally, I’m surely due a nice easy and straight forward project with a normal client.