Image Improvements

Meet the New Image Functionality

We know how critical images are to making your website successful, so we've been working hard on a major update that makes it even easier to manage your images.

• All images using product_image_uri or content_image_uri are now served directly from a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to offer a better experience to your customers
• WebP support is added, 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
• The image quality can be adjusted in real-time, on a per image basis
• Image URLs have changed to be even more SEO friendly

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Rollout

This is available imminently on test systems with a production release in early 2022

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. That's better performance, security and availability straight out of the box.

WebP

Google introduced the WebP standard over a decade ago, but only in recent years has it has started to become more widely used, as browsers begin to support it. You can now choose which format you want to retrieve your images in, 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.

We are also introducing a feature called Auto WebP. As not all browsers support WebP, we can detect if the browser has support, and automatically display all your images in WebP format to those customers. 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 now 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.

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Example

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

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

We have modified image URLs to be even more SEO friendly.

Before: https://www.auroracommerce.com/images/20160513131611/ap/resizeandpad:500:500/80554/seo-examplefilename-here.jpg

After: https://assets.auroracommerce.com/p/80554/seo-examplefilename-here.jpg?t=rp&w=500&h=500

Simplified Settings

The Settings page has been dramatically simplified to make it much easier to manage. Gone are the endless lists of choices, and instead we offer just a few settings:

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

The following have been removed, as they are now enabled and cannot be turned off:

• SEO Filename
• Dynamic Image Management

The following have been deprecated:

• Watermark functionality removed
• Optimise images is removed, as everything is optimised by default

Limitations

Whilst we do not expect this to cause any issues, we have introduced the following limits on resizing images:

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