ngx-advanced-img

Angular attribute directives suite that provides various HTML img feature extensions.

Table of contents

• ngx-advanced-img
  • Table of contents
  • About This Package
  • Installation
  • Usage
  • Directives
    • ngxAdvancedImgFallback
• Classes
  • NgxAdvancedImgBitmap
    • Creating Bitmap
    • Optimizing Bitmaps

About This Package

This package was built to provide easy to use feature directives that are meant to be used with HTML img tags. The first features being created are fallback image loading and progressive image loading and caching. Additionally, it provides helper classes that allow image data to be cached in application memory for quick HTML5 Canvas usage and the library also provides an easy to use interface for encoding images with new mime types and optimize them to meet certain conditions or file sizes.

Installation

npm install ngx-advanced-img --save

Usage

1. Import NgxAdvancedImgModule in your app module (or other Angular module) and place it in your imports section:

   import { NgxAdvancedImgModule } from "ngx-advanced-img";
   
   @NgModule({
      imports: [
        ...,
        NgxAdvancedImgModule,
      ],
      ...
   })
   export class AppModule { }

2. Import ngx-advanced-img.scss to your application's styles or add it to your angular.json if you use the CLI tools.

Directives

ngxAdvancedImgFallback

This directive extends HTML img nodes to provide some special fallback loading functionality. If the initial load of the image src value fails, this directive will automatically swap to the provided fallback URL or data URI. Alternatively, you may provide a special value of cache-bust and it will handle reloading prevoiusly failed src but with a unique cache busting query parameter attached to the URL (assuming it is a valid URL).

ngxAdvancedImgFallback {'cache-bust' | string}

• cache-bust: If the img src is a valid URL and it fails to load, the img will fallback to the exact same url but with a ?cache-bust query parameter added to it including a uniqiue timestamp value.
• string: If the img src fails to load, the img will fallback to the provided string. This should be a valid URL or data URI. If this fails to load, no further action is taken.

ngxAdvancedImgFallbackActive {read-only boolean}

• Returns the active state of the fallback. If the fallback is currently being displayed, then this will return as true. This is useful if you need to change width/height or other attributes of your img element based on whether or not the fallback is active.

Classes

These classes require no import of the module, but you can import the classes directly into your source code.

NgxAdvancedImgBitmap

This class is used to load image data into application memory using HTML5 canvas technology. This allows a user of this class to efficiently load and draw images to screen. It additionally provides extra support for dealing with SVGs in HTML5 and also provides the ability to optimize a given image file to reduce its file size in browser.

Creating Bitmap

const bitmap: NgxAdvancedImgBitmap = new NgxAdvancedImgBitmap(
  src,
  resolution,
  revision,
  ttl,
);

• src: string | Blob - The source for the image to be loaded. Either a string or file Blob.
• resolution: NgxAdvancedImgResolution - The suffix that will be added to the filepath if it is a string. This allows for variable resolution loading (e.g. '_low-res', '_high-res').
• revision: number - The image revision. It will add a query parameter to help with cache busting if we are trying to load a specific image with revision to it.
• ttl?: number - The time to live. If 0 or undefined, the data will live in memory forever. Otherwise, it will be purged after this many seconds.

Optimizing Bitmaps

You can optimize an already loaded image bitmap by using the optimize function.

bitmap.load().finally(() => {
  console.log('bitmap loaded with size (B):', bitmap.fileSize);

  bitmap.optimize(
    bitmap.mimeType,
    +this.quality,
    +this.scale / 100,
    +this.maxDimension,
    {
      sizeLimit: +this.size,
      mode: this.mode,
      strict: !!this.strictMode,
    },
    options?: INgxAdvancedImgOptimizationOptions,
  ).then((data: INgxAdvancedImgBitmapOptimization) => {
    // ... save the file? use that resultant data in other canvases?
  }).catch(() => {
    // ... if things fail
  });
});

• type - The mime type for the resultant data (e.g. image/jpeg, image/png, etc.)
• quality - A number between 0-1 that indicates the encoding quality to use (or start with if limiting by size).
• resizeFactor - Optional parameter that will scale the physical size of the image by this factor.
• maxDimension - Optional parameter that will limit the maximum dimension (width/height) of the image to while retaining aspect ratio.
• options - Optional parameter that drives optimization options. When provided, the optimize algorithm will attempt to perform the optimization in accordance with the provided mode to achieve a size within the limit of the sizeLimit.
• mode - (prefer-quality | prefer-size | balanced | hardcore) - Optional parameter that specifies what size limiting mode to use. Default is balanced.
  • sizeLimit - The maximum number of bytes we would like the resultant image to be.
  • minDimension - The minimum dimension that the photo will be optimized to.
  • minScale - The minimum scaling factor that will be used while optimizing.
  • minQuality - The minimum quality that will be used while optimizing.
  • mode - The optimization algorithm to use to try and achieve the sizeLimit threshold.
    • prefer-quality - Reduces the size of the image first until a threshold is achieved. Then it starts to reduce quality after that to try and achieve the sizeLimit.
    • prefer-size - Reduces the quality of the image first until a threshold is achieved. Then it starts to reduce size after that to try and achieve the sizeLimit.
    • retain-quality - Reduces the size of the photo only in order to try and achieve the sizeLimit threshold.
    • retain-size - Reduces the quality of the photo only in order to try and achieve the sizeLimit threshold.
    • alternating-preference - Alternates between adjusting quality and size. This is usually the slowest method.
  • strict - Optional parameter, if set to true, will throw an exception if a given sizeLimit is unobtainable. If set to false, the optimization will return whatever data it can generate as close to the size limit as possible.

Important Note

The resultant bitmap data will have all exif meta data stripped from it since the optimization procedure uses HTML5 canvas operations to manipulate the data. All exif meta data is included in the response object of the function call so that you may work with it as necessary if you are in a controlled server environment where you have reliable and efficient means for writing exif data back to images. In the browser environment, this isn't really the case without limiting our output mime types. Therefore, such considerations should be those of the wielder of this library.