images

With CSS filter effects and blend modes, we can now leverage various techniques for styling images directly in the browser. However, creating aesthetic theming isn't all that filter effects are good for. You can use filters to indicate hover state, hide passwords, and now—for web performance.

While playing with profiling performance wins of using blend modes for duotone image effects (I'll write up an article on this soon), I discovered something even more exciting. A major image optimization win! The idea is to reduce image contrast in the source image, reducing its file size, then boosting the contrast back up with CSS filters!

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Most WordPress themes show user Gravatars in the comment threads. It's a way of showing an image with the user, as associated by the email address used. It's a nice touch, and almost an expected design pattern these days.

Every one of those gravatars is an individual HTTP request though, like any other image. A comment thread with 50 comments means 50 HTTP requests, and they aren't always particularly tiny files. Yeesh.

Let's lazy load them.

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Let's say you want to find an <img /> on the page and find out how wide it is in JavaScript. Maybe you need to make some choices based on that width (or height, or both) You can definitely do that. The DOM will even give you a variety of dimensions to choose from depending on what you need. There is definitely a catch though.

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Working on your website locally means having the files that make your website tick right there on your computer. It's common those files live in a version control repository. You work on them, and push them up to the repo when you are ready. Other people work too, and you pull their changes back down.

What might not be in that repo, are images files from the CMS. WordPress is a classic example of this. When you upload an image in WordPress, it does a whole song and dance. It gets uploaded to the `uploads` folder, multiple versions are created, even the database is updated and attachment meta data happens. What doesn't happen is that a version control commit happens with all those files.

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We've all been there before: You're browsing a website that has a ton of huge images of delicious food, or maybe that new gadget you've been eyeballing. These images tug at your senses, and for content authors, they're essential in moving people to do things.

Except that these images are downright huge. Like really huge. On a doddering mobile connection, you can even see these images unfurl before you like a descending window shade. You're suddenly reminded of the bad old days of dial-up.

This is a problem, because images represent a significant portion of what's downloaded on a typical website, and for good reason. Images are expressive tools, and they have the ability to speak more than copy can. The challenge is in walking the tightrope between visually rich content, and the speedy delivery of it.

The solution to this dilemma is not one dimensional. (more…)

The following is a guest post by Damon Bauer, who tackles a pretty common web developer job: offering user image uploads. I'd hesitate to call it easy, but with the help of some powerful tools that do a lot of the heavy lifting, this job has gotten a heck of a lot easier than it used to be. Damon even does it entirely in the browser!

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The following is a guest post by Aleks Hudochenkov. Aleks does a great job here of showcasing what PostCSS is good at and the role it has grown into in the front end stack. That is: doing little useful jobs within CSS. You're about to see a variety of PostCSS plugins at work that are all related to working with images. By the end, I bet you'll be able to imagine how PostCSS can be useful for other niches within working with CSS.

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object-fit and object-position are my two favourite CSS properties lately. They give developers control over the content inside an img or a video similar to the way that we can manipulate the content of a background with background-position and background-size.

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