How would I serve zipped images via HTTP?

Question

I want users to upload their high-resolution image files for safe-keeping. They may want to print them or do something else in the future that requires starting with the full version of the file.

For regular display, I will present a smaller version, e.g. 1024x800. But they will have the option of retrieving the multi-mega-pixel file.

I could store that in some kind of a zip file and save a lot of disk space, but is there a way to make my webserver serve up the image out of that zip?

Browser: GET MyBigImage.jpg Server: load MyBigImage.jpg.zip and return MyBigImage.jpg.

I am thinking of this in the context of Apache or Nginx, but will consider solutions with any web server.

I'm not really interested in running an optimization on the file and storing only that optimized version as is suggested at How does Google's Page Speed lossless image compression work? .

Thanks!

Zipping already compressed files is unlikely to save much space: http://askubuntu.com/questions/274117/why-are-the-zip-files-of-compressed-jpegs-about-the-same-size — Paul Collingwood, Dec 05 '13 at 16:42
Good point, Paul. I just checked some images off my Android and got minimal compression. — Daniel Wilson, Dec 05 '13 at 17:38
and don't forget CPU time increase for zipping for little gain! probably not worth it. — Paul Collingwood, Dec 05 '13 at 17:55

Ali · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-07T07:22:47.587

If you compress your images using gzip, then you can serve the compressed image file directly and just set the Content-Encoding header to gzip.

For example the following php script will do that:

<?php
header('Content-Encoding: gzip');
echo file_get_contents('./gzipped_images/' . $_GET['image']);
?>

Or on nginx you can do this:

location /gzipped_images {
    more_set_headers 'Content-Encoding: gzip';
}

just note that you will need the HttpHeadersMoreModule

How would I serve zipped images via HTTP?

1 Answers1