Automatically optimise uploaded images for web

[ak-42]

What is the problem you are trying to solve with this feature?

When I upload images from a phone, they're quite large. On my personal phone, they're around 4 MB. This is too big, and presents a problem if you only have limited amount of fast storage, as moving the database to spinning rust is not viable.

What is the solution you are proposing?

Suggested solution, in my order of preference:

1. Homebox application should downscale the image to, ideally, less than 0.5 MB in size. These are inventory records, not works of art, they don't need to be stored and shown at full quality.

2. Homebox could automatically convert them to a more efficient image format, such as .webp.

3. Homebox could allow external storage of the files, so that the database may remain on fast storage, but the images can load from slower storage.

4. Lastly, as the least preferred option, if it was possible to opt out of the new image-storage scheme, we could go back to manually managing image size.

What alternatives have you considered?

Prior to v0.19.0, I would simply manually open the docker volume and batch downscale all .jpg images using command line.
But with changes to how the images are stored, this is no longer viable.

For my own setup, I may explore symlinking the files' directory to slower but larger storage, but I'm not excited about that option. It seems hacky, and I'm not sure how the application would handle that.

Additional context

No response

Contributions

• I have searched through existing ideas in the discussions to check if this is a duplicate

[tonyaellie]

Image Resizing/Compression is planned as part of the #265 epic