Rails Paperclip image compression compared to what Page Speed produces

Question

I've set up paperclip in rails and everything is working hunky-dory (i actually had to google that...:).

I've noticed however that Page Speed tells me I could losslessly compress my thumbnail and large images (the ones that paperclip produces) further. Is there an option I can put into my model which does this? I've noticed that mod_deflate doesn't compress images (I'm using Firefox).

score 10 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 24 '16 at 11:14

10

You can add compression to paperclip processing using the paperclip-compression gem.

In your Gemfile:

gem "paperclip-compression", "~> 0.1.1"

(of course run bundle install)

In your model:

has_attached_file :avatar,
                :styles     => { :medium => "300x300>", :thumb => "100x100>" },
                :processors => [:thumbnail, :compression]

"jpegtran works by rearranging the compressed data (DCT coefficients), without ever fully decoding the image. Therefore, its transformations are lossless"

Note: if you are running on heroku, you'll need jpegtran, and optipng binaries added to your application. Here's a good article on running binaries on heroku.

edited Apr 24 '16 at 11:14

mb21

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answered Jan 08 '13 at 18:43

vansan

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Would this work with Rails 2.3? The application is failing to start. – SnakeWasTheNameTheyGaveMe Jan 08 '13 at 20:43
Not sure if this would work in 2.3. I'm using it in 3.2. Check the paperclip-compression dependencies. – vansan Jan 08 '13 at 21:47

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 02 '11 at 16:42

You should do your own testing on various JPEG compression levels but I've noticed that I can bump ImageMagicks quality setting down to 75 and still not see any noticeable difference - with about a 30-40% file size savings.

My model looks like:

  has_attached_file :photo,
    :styles => {
      :"185x138" => {
        :geometry => "185x138>"
      }    },
    :convert_options => {
      :all => "-auto-orient",
      :"185x138" => "-quality 75",

-quality 75 is for ImageMagick. If you're using a different processor you will need to adjust accordingly.

I'm still seeing that "I could get a 22% reduction in size by losslessly compressing the image" according to Page Speed. — SnakeWasTheNameTheyGaveMe, Jul 02 '11 at 23:23

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 04 '13 at 10:19

What about FFMPEG or AVCONV?

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg/avconv

= initializer

Paperclip.options[:command_path] = "/usr/bin/" # see `which ffmpeg`

= Modal

after_save :compress_with_ffmpeg

def compress_with_ffmpeg
  [:thumb, :original, :medium].each do |type|
    img_path = self.avtar.path(type)
    Paperclip.run("ffmpeg", " -i #{img_path} #{img_path}")
  end
end

Rails Paperclip image compression compared to what Page Speed produces

3 Answers3