Image Handling & Features

Meet Aurora's Image Functionality

We know how critical images are to making your website successful, so we have some significant features that make it easier to manage your images.

• All images using product_image_uri or content_image_uri are served directly from a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to offer the best possible experience to your customers
• WebP support is built-in, giving you the opportunity to dramatically reduce the size of your images, whilst maintaining quality (Image file sizes can be up to 25-35% smaller than alternative formats, such as JPEG, GIF and PNG)
• The image quality can be adjusted in real-time, on a per image basis
• Image URLs are generated to be SEO friendly

CDN

A CDN offers many benefits to your customers: better response times, protection against bots, and the ability to endlessly scale as your business grows.

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Out of the Box!

That's better performance, security and availability straight out of the box with your Aurora-powered Store!

WebP

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What is WebP?

Google introduced the WebP standard over a decade ago, but only in recent years has it started to become more widely used, as browsers begin to support it. This format boasts improved compression with reduced loss of quality of its usual alternatives (JPEG, GIF, PNG).

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You can choose which format you want to retrieve your images in using Aurora, regardless of how you uploaded them. If you uploaded an image as a jpeg but want a WebP returned, or vice versa, not a problem!

Auto WebP, for when you are not sure

As not all browsers currently support WebP, Aurora supports a feature called Auto WebP.

Using Auto WebP, Aurora can detect if the browser has support and automatically display all your images in WebP format to those customers that can use it. If a browser lacks support, the original format (likely jpeg) will be returned instead.

Image Quality

If you want individual images in different quality or you just want to play around with the image quality to see what works, you can do this without needing to clear the image cache. If you change the image quality it will change all the URLs on your site to include the quality parameter. If nothing is set, it will default to the standard URL, which is what is recommended for SEO.

You can also manually adjust quality image by image.

https://assets.auroracommerce.com/p/228/seo-examplefilename.jpg?t=rp&w=247&h=547

https://assets.auroracommerce.com/p/228/seo-examplefilename.jpg?t=rp&w=247&h=547&q=75

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The "q=75" tells Aurora to return the image with a quality of 75%. You can even do this for different filename extensions, so request 80% for webp and 75% for jpeg.

SEO Friendly Image URLs

Aurora's image URLs have been designed with SEO at the forefront to ensure they are friendly to your SEO consumers.

This is maintained by:

• Ensuring that the parameters are always served in a consistent order
• When parameters are received in the wrong order in a request URL, the request is predicted to the correct, normalised structure to ensure there are no unnecessary permutations

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For more detail on the URL structure, please see the Image URL Transformation Guide.

Simplified Settings

The settings page is simplified to make it easy to manage. Gone are the endless lists of choices, and instead we offer just the essentials:

• Image Quality
• Permalink
• Clear Cache
• "No Image" choice

Limitations

Whilst we do not expect this to cause any issues, Aurora has the following limits when resizing images:

• Images cannot be more than 5000x5000
• Images cannot be more than 5MB
• Multiple Languages specific images are not supported