I love Kirby for the speed of the panel, among a lot of other things.
The only thing that slows things down a lot is the thumbnail management in my opinion. I’ve recorded a video of how the panel manages thumbnails:
Explanation:
I click on the page the first time. The 75x75 thumbnails are created. Those are used for the drag-and-drop functionality.
I switch to the file overview. The 400x266 thumbnails are created. Those are used for the image previews in the overview.
I upload a new image. The whole page folder in thumbs is deleted and all the thumbnails need to be created again.
I used a few relatively big images here just to simulate a image heavy page with a lot more images.
In my opinion point 3 should be optimized. Why is it necessary to delete all the thumbnails?
I recently worked on a page with ~50 images with 100kb–400kb sizes. I had to reload a few times for it to work.
Regarding point 1 and 2: to cut the first page load in half I think the panel could use the same thumbnail for the two views. It doesn’t make a big difference in my opinion to use squared previews:
So timely! @thguenther … I’m experiencing the same issue right now in panel. Dealing with some pages that have about 10 ~5mb PNGs with transparent backgrounds.
When any image is deleted in the edit mode, all of the sibling image thumbnails for the main page edit screen are subsequently deleted. Then, when back to the main page edit screen, the sibling image thumbnails all get regenerated. All of this takes a small toll on the server and is quite slow. Also I happen to be running the Gallery Field plugin which has two additional image sizes to regenerate.
I observed this weird behaviour while adding thumbs to the Quickselect Field. The additional thumbs slowed the panel down even more. It’s the same thing with the Gallery Field, as you mentioned.
Apart from the “deleting all the thumbs” issue it would be great to have the thumbs load asynchronously and not stop the panel from loading for a long time. I think something like this would feel way faster and be more convenient:
For anyone still interested in this topic, I just noticed something:
The ImageKit plugin by @fabianmichael not only speeds up the frontend but also the panel by asynchronously creating the thumbnails. It does exactly what I simulated in the image above.
This makes it a must-have for image-heavy Kirby sites in my opinion.
It’s still annoying all the thumbnails are being deleted once an image get’s added, removed or even just renamed. I’ve added an issue on GitHub by the way: https://github.com/getkirby/panel/issues/971
But at least it doesn’t stop the panel from working with this plugin.
