Jekyll Picture Tag

Help Wanted

My life just got a lot busier; I'd really like a maintainer or two to help. I'm not abandoning JPT, I just don't have a ton of time to put into hacking on it.

If you've been learning Ruby and you want to move beyond tutorials and throwaway projects, I'd love to hear from you. I'd be happy to help you gain experience and credibility, if you're willing to help me maintain this project!

If you're interested, contact me: robert@buchberger.cc

Responsive Images done correctly.

It's simple to throw a photo on a page and call it a day, but doing justice to users on all different browsers and devices is tedious and tricky. Tedious, tricky things should be automated. This blog post further elaborates on that theme.

Jekyll Picture Tag automatically builds cropped, resized, and reformatted images, builds several kinds of markup, offers extensive configuration while requiring none, and solves both the art direction and resolution switching problems with a little YAML configuration and a simple template tag.

Why use Responsive Images?

Performance: The fastest sites are static sites, but if you plonk a 2mb picture of your dog at the top of a blog post you throw it all away. Responsive images allow you to keep your site fast, without compromising image quality.

Design: Your desktop image may not work well on mobile, regardless of its resolution. We often want to do more than just resize images for different screen sizes, we want to crop them or use a different image entirely.

Why use Jekyll Picture Tag?

Developer Sanity: If you want to serve multiple images in multiple formats and resolutions, you have a litany of markup to write and a big pile of images to generate and organize. Jekyll Picture Tag is your responsive images minion - give it simple instructions and it'll handle the rest.

Features

• Generate piles of cropped, resized, and converted image files.
• Generate corresponding markup in several different formats.
• Configure it easily, or not at all.
• Make Lighthouse happy.

Documentation:

https://rbuchberger.github.io/jekyll_picture_tag/

Changelog:

https://rbuchberger.github.io/jekyll_picture_tag/devs/releases

Recent releases:

• 2.0.4 August 16, 2022
  • Fix backend format support detection for new versions of libvips & imagemagick
• 2.0.3 April 1, 2021
  • Improve backend format support detection
• 2.0.2 March 31, 2021
  • Do not pass a quality argument when generating PNG files.
    • It only works on newer versions of vips, breaking builds when using older versions (such as when deploying to netlify.)
    • It's not remarkably useful in the first place.
• 2.0.1 March 31, 2021
  • Select imagemagick deliberately when appropriate, rather than simply rescuing all vips errors and trying again. This will stop JPT from suppressing useful vips errors.
• 2.0 March 25, 2021 - Migration guide
  • Switch from ImageMagick to libvips.
    • 🚀🔥🔥MUCH MORE FASTER🔥🔥🚀
    • Will still attempt to use imagemagick if libvips cannot handle a particular image format.
    • Eliminate the ImageMagick v7 on Ubuntu pain we've been dealing with for so long.
  • Require Ruby >= 2.6, support Ruby 3.0
  • Require Jekyll >= 4.0
  • Cropping is changing.
    • We now use the libvips smartcrop function, which does some magic to keep the most useful part of the image.
    • Geometry is renamed to 'crop', and reduced to simple aspect ratios only. (width:height)
    • Gravity is gone, replaced by 'keep' which is translated to a libvips interestingness setting.
  • Add stock presets and media queries, under the jpt- prefix.
  • Add format_quality default settings for webp, avif, and jp2.
  • Add image-format-specific write options.
  • Overhaul user input handling; we can now validate inputs and give error messages which are less useless. Stronger validation and nicer errors will be added in future releases.
  • Drop support for markup_presets and media_presets. They are now officially and only presets and media_queries.
  • Improve docs with an introductory tutorial and 'how-to' flow.

Help Wanted

Writing code is only part of the job; often the harder part is knowing what needs to be changed. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated, especially in regards to documentation. What are your pain points? See the contributing guidelines, or the issues page for more.