RoR-e

I want to preface this post with a huge thank you to the developers I've had the chance to work with in Belarus (Altoros). Dmitry Ilyashevich and Yury Velikanau wrote the code that ended up in our code base but the whole team in Belarus is great.

Background

A few months ago my boss brought up a service called smush it. Basically this service allows you to upload an image and return an optimized image. Hence making a smaller image that still looks good for its size.

Taking a longer look Yahoo gives you the libraries they use to make smushit work. Take a look at the bottom of the above link(pngcrush && jpegtran). So the thought was that we could simply install these libraries on our server's that we upload pictures to. I wish I had been given this project but Dmitry, Yury and the Altoros team did a great job getting this working.

On to the code. What we did was create a paperclip_postprocess.rb file in config/initializers. Sorry but the code doesn't size well on the blog...

module Paperclip
  class Thumbnail < Processor
    def make
    src = @file
    conv = Tempfile.new([@basename, @format ? ".#{@format}" : ''])
    conv.binmode
    dst = Tempfile.new([@basename, @format ? ".#{@format}" : ''])
    dst.binmode

  begin
    parameters = []
    parameters << source_file_options
    parameters << ":source"
    parameters << transformation_command
    parameters << convert_options
    parameters << ":dest"

    parameters = parameters.flatten.compact.join(" ").strip.squeeze(" ")

    success = Paperclip.run("convert", parameters, :source => "#{File.expand_path(src.path)}[0]", :dest => File.expand_path(conv.path))

    if conv.size > 0
      format = begin
        Paperclip.run("identify", "-format %m :file", :file => "#{File.expand_path(conv.path)}[0]")
      rescue PaperclipCommandLineError
        ""
      end

      case format.strip
      when 'JPEG'
        # Part of libjpeg-progs deb package
        success = Paperclip.run('jpegtran', "-copy none -optimize -perfect :source > :dest", :source => File.expand_path(conv.path), :dest => File.expand_path(dst.path))
      when 'PNG'
        success = Paperclip.run('pngcrush', "-rem alla -reduce -brute :source :dest", :source => File.expand_path(conv.path), :dest => File.expand_path(dst.path))
      else
        dst = conv
      end
    end
  rescue Exception => e
    Rails.logger.error "There was an error processing the thumbnail for #{@basename}. Check imagemagick, jpegtran and pngcrush installed."

    HoptoadNotifier.notify(
      :error_class => "Paperclip - images optimization",
      :error_message => "Paperclip ERROR: #{e.message}"
    )
  end

  dst.size > 0 ? dst : conv
    end
  end
end

At the end of the day This reduced our file sizes dramatically. Some images were reduced in size by about 85%. It is well worth the extra time to get this set up with paperclip.

Check back later as we will try to create our own fork of paperclip and allow this to be a paperclip option. For now install jpegtran and pngcrush on your linux box and start optimizing your images.