Autogenerate thumbnails for quicker loading

[danielrosehill]

Sorry for the spate of feature requests recently! I'm doing some Inventory management ahead of a new arrival. So I'm jotting down ideas I'd like to work on down the line and because I'm using the system quite intensively.

One thing that I've noticed is that the system loads the original images every time. Which means that if you're shooting at a higher resolution the individual catalog pages can be quite slow to load.

I'm only familiar with how WordPress implement this, but I assume that the behaviour is provided by....some stack component. But it's something like:

• User uploads an image
• Backend automatically generates several reduced res copies including one for thumbnails
• when users navigate, the thumbnails are served. Full res versions are available for download or (the implementation that would make sense in HB specifically) when users click into the view modal.

For both the catalog and asset pages, the difference would probably be unperceptible. But reduction in page load time may be quite significant.

[tonyaellie]

this is part of the #265 epic