I got a little announcement to make. I know that some of you have used my ImageKit and ImageSet plugins for Kirby 2 in the past and I’m very thankful for all your support during all that time. Initially, I wanted to port the plugins to Kirby 3, to keep updating your old sites a very smooth experience. As Kirby 3 now supports asynchronous thumbnail creation without any third-party plugins, the focus of ImageKit would have shifted more towards image optimization, while ImageSet would probably just have been a port to Kirby 3. As 2019 was progressing, I realized that I would not have the time for developing new versions of these plugins. Compared to the regular earnings of a web developer, the plugins did not pay off very well. I only made less than € 4000 in total (before tax), by selling them. And each of those took about one month of full-time work, before they where ready to sell. That does not include the time spent on support and ongoing development in terms of adding new features and fixing bugs. Considering the fact, that I already got enough work to to and I’m currently working on a rather large personal project (made with Kirby, of course ), I did not see any chance to find enough time to work on such complex plugins any longer.
I finally came to the conclusion, that it is not feasible and also not possible for me to develop ImageKit and ImageSet any longer. I’m sorry for everyone, who bought a license and hoped for updated versions for Kirby 3. If anyone wants to use any of the code to develop something cool, you are welcome. I will change the license to MIT (which might be especially interesting for the frontend code of ImageSet).
Thanks for the feedback and the very good work on the plugin in the past. I am sad to hear that it will be discontinued, but fully understand your decision. All the best for the next steps
Fabian thank you for your work on ImageKit! I used it on two websites to resize all images in advance and it worked great!
You mention that Kirby 3 supports asynchronous thumbnail creation. Did that make it into the core? I haven’t heard of it before. I’m looking for a solution to resize images in advance in Kirby 3.
Hi, while Kirby supports asynchronous thumbnail creation, it only generates them on-the-fly, as they are requested by a user’s browser. There are probably some workarounds for that, but I did not go too deep into that so far. Maybe @bastianallgeier can give you further help. An alternative could be to switch to a CDN like imgix or KeyCDN for handling image-processing, as these are better at optimizing and are – unlike Kirby’s default thumbs engine – color-managed.
Hi,
Sorry for the in between switch, but what is the different in generating thumps with the Kirby thumbs driver or the crop/resize function and a third party solution like from @fabianmichael?
@JanStieler This always depends on the plugin itself. My plugin was mainly about providing an asynchronous thumbs engine, which Kirby 2 did not offer by default. Additional benefits where a panel widget for pre-rendering thumbnails and the utilization of some terminal applications for image optimization, resulting in smaller file sizes. But the feature-set always depends on what a plugin-author chooses to include with a plugin.
I’d say: If you don’t have any special needs, like color managed thumbnails or some special effects, use Kirby’s built-in thumbs engine and maybe the janitor plugin for pre-rendering all thumbnails on image-heavy sites. The latter ensures, that the first user who loads an image at a particular size has to wait longer than usual while the image is being generated in the background.
But if your project is for a larger international audience (e.g. getkirby.com ) or image optimization/color management is crucial, then using a third-party CDN might be the best/easiest option. Their servers are fast and generate thumbnails on-the-fly. If these are your requirements, then I’d recommend to have a look at this wonderful cookbook recipe: Kirby loves CDN | Kirby
If you need advanced image processing and don’t want to spend your money on an additional service, installing something like Glide on your own server could be an alternative that’s relatively easy to install on your own server: https://glide.thephpleague.com/
), I did not see any chance to find enough time to work on such complex plugins any longer.