As a Moodle site administrator, are you always worried about the size of the images used by the course designers? Being unaware about the impact sometimes they may upload a picture taken by a good quality camera of size more than 5 Mega Pixels when they don’t need such a high-resolution. It will affect the page load time and consume more bandwidth which is crucial for students accessing your course from Mobile devices.
One way to overcome this problem is either to train all the course designers about image size and compression techniques, but they may be reluctant in following the same. The second way and highly recommended way to overcome this is to use the Image Optimizer filter plugin on your Moodle site.
Features of Image Optimizer Plugin:
Image Optimizer is a filter plugin for Moodle which is available for Moodle 3.2 version. The plugin is developed by Guy Thomas. Image optimizer plugin helps Moodle site administrators in three ways:
- It will resize images that are greater than a maximum width and preserve aspect ratios and original images.
- Allow for delayed loading of images (load when visible)
- Resizes images in all filterable text – course content, user profile description, etc.
The motive behind the development of this plugin is to solve the issue of high-resolution images slowing down (and blocking) page loads. Indeed the plugin works like a charm and perform the intended behavior without any difficulties. The plugin manages to cut the page load size considerably by almost half which can be extremely helpful for the students accessing your course form mobile devices. By default, the optimiser both place holds (load when visible) and resizes (maximum image width) to 800px.
Here is a small video overview of the Image Optimizer plugin for Moodle:
The plugin is extremely helpful for Moodle site administrators and teachers to cut the course size and effectively use the mobile data by the students. The plugin has been awarded with the Reviewers’ choice badge for its usefulness to the Moodle community. You can download the plugin from the Moodle plugins directory here.
Now, over to you.
How you deal with the image sizes on your Moodle site? What are the other tools you are using to compress the images? Share with us in the comments section below.
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