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Delivery and Management Checklist
When implementing ImageKit, ensure that you at least cover the items listed under "Must-haves". It would be great to cover those listed under "Good-to-haves" as well.
Ensure that you are delivering the images in the correct format. If available, for your account, do get automatic AVIF conversion enabled as well.
For mobile apps, in the absence of the right content negotiation headers, it is best to force the output format using URL transformation parameters. The best practices for format optimization for mobile apps have been explained here.
It is possible to further reduce the size of the images and videos via compression without reducing the perceived quality of the output file.
One compression method is removing all the metadata associated with the file that’s not needed for display on the app. You can enable this for image files by setting the Preserve metadata option to “Discard all metadata”, or set it explicitly in the URL transformation parameters. Read more about image metadata optimization here.
The other method uses lossy compression to reduce the file size. However, the human eye cannot perceive the changes in an image or video delivered at a slightly reduced quality. You can turn this on for images by enabling automatic quality optimization here. The ideal default quality for images is 80. For videos, you can enable the same here and keep the default quality at 50.
This is the most important part of optimizing media experiences on the web and apps. Different pages and placeholders require images and videos to be rendered in different sizes. Loading a 2000x2000px image is incorrect when the placeholder is just 250x250px wide. However, you also need to consider high-density displays (like retina displays) that require a higher-resolution image to be loaded to maintain the same visual clarity across devices.
Using ImageKit’s URL-based transformation parameters for height, width, aspect ratio, DPR, and other crop modes will help you attain the right fit you need for your media files.
Images
Implementing responsive images for the web is recommended, especially if you have a server-side rendered application. You can read more about responsive images here.
If you have a client-side rendered application, you can get the right size and DPR using the URL transformation parameters when constructing the image URL.
Videos
Use the width, height, and aspect ratio parameters and combine them with the available crop modes to get the video to fit your desired layout.
If resizing using width and height parameters, try bucketing the sizes if implementing this technique. For example, for all devices with less than 360px width, render the image at 360px width. For all devices between 360px and 480px width, render the image at 480px width. Keep the number of size variations for a single resource to 5. This reduces the number of generated variants, improving the cache-hit ratio and load performance.
You need not load upfront any media not visible to the user on the screen when they first open your website or app. This helps reduce the data to be downloaded and rendered on the user's screen, thereby using the user's device's capabilities and available bandwidth to load and render more critical resources and speeding up the perceived loading experience.
You can do this using several standard libraries on different platforms for images and videos. You can read more about lazy loading images here.
Use ImageKit to create placeholder content till your actual image loads. For example, you can load a blurred, low-quality version of your image in place of the original image.
Run critical pages of your website, like the home page, product detail page, product listing page, article page, etc., through Lighthouse or PageSpeed, or other similar tools. Ensure that no image-related issues are reported. If such issues are reported, ensure that the image is being loaded via ImageKit. Also, see that you have implemented points 1 to 4 for them to optimize the PageSpeed score.
Run these reports monthly or after major UI updates to ensure your page performance is on track.
If your website or app loads videos that are over 30 seconds in length, it is recommended to use Adaptive Bitrate Streaming for them so that you can adjust the video stream quality to the user’s network bandwidth. This is similar to the experience you get on YouTube, where on poorer network conditions, you see a low-quality video that automatically improves as your network speed improves.
With ImageKit, you can implement DASH and HLS protocols for Adaptive Bitrate Streaming using simple URL transformations. Read more about Adaptive Bitrate Streaming with ImageKit here. If you have any questions, reach out to us on [email protected]
We often miss out on using suitable transformation parameters in our image URLs. In such cases, if the original image is a high-resolution image, it would consume a lot of bandwidth.
To avoid this, set the maximum image size in the ImageKit dashboard here. ImageKit will use this as a size limit for your images when the URL does not contain any height or width resizing parameters.
Named Transformations simplify development efforts by giving easy-to-remember aliases to transformations you use on your website. For example, a transform to generate a watermarked image of size 200x200 (
w-200,h-200,oi-logo.png) can be referred to as n-watermarked-thumbnail in your URL.Named Transforms also provide an optional additional layer of security by limiting the allowed transformations on your account to only the named transformations created by you.
A high-resolution, high-quality image or video can always be scaled down using ImageKit. But the reverse is not true. Start with a low-resolution file, and you get restricted to using that image on all devices, even those requiring a higher resolution.
For images, it is generally recommended to start above 1500 x 1500px in dimensions. You can scale them down using the resizing parameters in ImageKit. Similarly, start with HD or Full HD for videos and then scale it down.
Refrain from compressing your media files when exporting in Photoshop or Premier Pro. ImageKit can do all the compression for you in one go. Limiting all the compression in a single pass at Imagekit also ensures that the output is at a higher quality compared to multiple optimization levels.
Getting the folder hierarchy right is extremely important when dealing with a large volume of media assets across different categories. It helps build a shared knowledge base within the team of where to store and, more importantly, find the right content.
ImageKit’s media library also offers content tagging and custom metadata to build your custom organization scheme. Using these, you can search for files not just by their names or the folders they are in but also by attributes like their collar, product category, intended use, and more, which are relevant to your business or use case.
When using APIs to upload and manage images in ImageKit’s media library, ensure that you store the File ID you get in response to the file upload API. The File ID is the unique identifier that can be used across multiple operations like file details, delete, copy, move, etc.
ImageKit’s media library has a built-in image editor and AI-powered background removal. So, suppose you quickly want to replace the background of your image or make a simple change before you post your image on social media instead of going to your graphic designers. In that case, you can do it directly in the browser using the built-in editors. This reduces the requirement for additional software licenses and saves time, improving your team’s velocity in rolling out new campaigns.
Last modified 1yr ago