Rokka – our image storage and delivery service, got quite some new features lately, thanks also to feedback from our users. Here's a list of the visible stuff we did.
Brandnew this week
- autoformat. A new stack option. If set, rokka will return WebP, if the client supports it and a PNG or JPEG was requested, resulting in smaller images.
- dpr. Device Pixel Ratio. Another new stack option. If set, returns higher resolution images, useful for
<img srcset="" />for example. - Width or height are finally optional in the resize operation.
- The WordPress plugin got some improvements.
- Work for a Drupal 8 module and a Kirby plugin are under way.
- General improvements in performance, failover cases and small bugfixes.
In the last few weeks
- Further compression of PNG/JPEG/Lossless WebP. We do some async compression of images with zopflipng, pngquant and mozjpeg to make the images even smaller bytewise. Async meaning, the first request will not be totally optimized (to return the result as fast as possible), but requests to the same image made a few seconds later are.
- We support PDF and SVG as upload format. If operations are applied to them, they are converted to a bitmap image first. But you can also just deliver those formats as they are. See next point.
- You can now deliver a source image with no conversion done at all (and no additional compression). As mentioned, very useful for PDF and SVG files.
- The confusing noop stak operation is deprecated, just use an empty stack operation list, if you don't need an operation at all and just want to output the original image (with format transformation and later enhanced compression still applied).
- You can now officially use dynamic stacks like normal stacks, the same cache rules and optimizations as with normal stacks apply.
- Stack options can now also be applied and overwritten in the URL.
- The same binary can have different hashes now, mainly useful for the next point.
- Changing the SubjectArea doesn't delete the old hash/image anymore by default.
- Allow overwriting/updating of stacks (before you were only able to delete and create) .
Even older
- Basestacks. Stacks based on stacks to avoid repetition.
- Obviously: WebP support.
- A browser based Admin UI / Dashboard for managing images, stacks and stats.
- User defined metadata for images.
- Advanced search of images and their metadata.
Near future
- The next big feature will almost certainly be a way to just let rokka fetch pictures from your origin automatically the first time they are requested. Details are to be figured out, but this will make getting started with rokka much easier.
- Tell us, what you miss. We're happy to listen to you.