Our team has made some giant leaps in helping me solve the recurring design crisis of designing a webpage without knowing what photos will eventually be shown in the space. The new love of my life is called file server technology.

Let’s face it – most people don’t have a robust image editing software such as Photoshop handy to resize, shrink, crop and optimize JPGs and other web images for on-screen delivery. Well, utilizing our file server technology allows us to work wonders for our ecommerce clients who want the ability to manage product imagery on their sites, and keep it looking professional, all on-the-fly.

Instead of requiring clients to upload multiple versions of an image via an administrative interface (usually a thumbnail, regular size and larger zoomed-in size) they ONLY upload one image – the biggest one they can find. From that image, we can generate all the different sizes for thumbnail views, etc. and even do photo optimization that doesn’t render a skewed or “crungly” looking image.

The great example of all the different sizes we can generate from a single image is on the KEEN shopping site. Every image on this product wall is coming from a single giant image that we eventually use on a main product page like this. Clicking on the main shoe image on the right gives you the zoomed-in original image that feeds all the other sizes of the same image within the site…and the best part is – they all look great!

The results have been so amazing that we’ve even been retrofitting some of our older projects to include file serving to enhance the user experience. I no longer lay awake at night wondering how many “crungly,” low-resolution, blurry images someone is uploading to one of our sites!