Centralized image & document management

Centralized image and document management serves one main purpose: You upload something once, and you can then link to it from anywhere, and use it for an unlimited amount of times, without ever uploading it again. If you decide to change or replace that something (an image, or a document), you only have to do it once, and the change is automatically propagated to all instances (it’s a fancy word for every place where you have linked to that image or document).

In case of images, this centralized solution serves yet another powerful purpose. For each uploaded image, the system automatically creates all the necessary image variations¹. These variations are created automatically, and the caching and create-when-needed mechanisms ensure that only those variations that don’t yet exist should be created. Once they’re created, they’re served instantly, without the need for recreation (yes, you still have the ability to reset and delete all the created variations, in which case they’re recreated according to the parameters stored for the previous variation definitions).

¹ Each uploaded image generates a configurable number of configurable variations. Yes, it’s a mouthful, but an example will describe this much better. Let’s say you upload an image of 800×600 pixels. That original image is stored in the repository, and all of the variations (thumbnail, larger thumbnail, medium sized, etc.) are then generated from that original image. The original image is never modified. Each possible variation is described by its width and height, and whether it should maintain its aspect ratio or not. In addition to that, each kind of variation can have certain additional effects applied to it by default, such as: blur, sharpen, colorize, borders, etc.). In order to complicate things a bit further, we’ve developed an online image editor for these variations. Using the editor you can even define a crop area of the original large picture, and the system will automatically crop the original image into a variation. This is actually a nice little cropping tool for each of the variations, which can be deployed for magnifying portions of a large picture or things like that. Check the screenshots and you’ll get a much better idea of what this little baby can do.